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Casper Yang is one of Moxa's most experienced engineers and has seen a lot in his 12 years of working with industrial serial technology. Join us as he answers a few questions about his experiences with serial technology: |
What is your background in this field?
I've spent my entire career working with serial communication products. I joined Moxa in 1996 and worked on driver development for our multiport serial cards. When we expanded into device servers, I was part of the software engineering team, working on our RealCOM and Linux/Unix TTY drivers and on our NPort search utility.
Currently, I lead the software and firmware team for multiport serial cards and USB-to-serial hubs, and I contribute to their product development.
What do you think about the current market for industrial serial technology?
First of all, let's clarify what exactly we mean by serial technology, since a lot of different technologies can be described as serial. For  our purposes, serial technology refers to the three major data communication standards: RS-232, RS-422, and RS-485.
Now, serial technology is definitely not a hot new growth market, not like Ethernet or wireless technology. However, the demand for serial technology continues to be very strong, and extremely reliable. That's because for many applications, you simply cannot replace the level of reliability, simplicity, and cost-effectiveness that RS-232, RS-422, and RS-485 offer.
Serial technology has been around for so long that engineers already know it inside and out, backwards and forwards. We know exactly what jobs it can handle, and we know exactly how to make it work. In this industry, you stick with the tried-and-tested solution whenever you can. You do not swap it out for a fancier, more complicated technology if you can help it. That's why I have no doubt in my mind that serial communication will continue to play a major role in industrial systems for the next twenty years or more.
In fact, the hot new communication technologies actually end up generating new opportunities for serial device manufacturers. Every new communication interface in this business eventually requires a way to connect to serial-based devices. Developing these serial connectivity products is one of our core specialties at Moxa, and it's something we've invested a lot of time and effort in.
What trends do you see in this market?
 Manufacturers will continue to rely on RS-232, RS-422, and RS-485 for many of their devices. There won’t be any further development in serial technology itself.
Devices are evolving, though, and the more advanced devices have already shifted towards Ethernet as the main communication medium. The main trends that we’re seeing are occurring on the host side. For example, RS-232 interfaces are not being built into many PCs, laptops, and other devices. This means that alternate ways are needed to connect to the serial-based devices in the field, such as over USB.
We're seeing more and more PC's using multi-core CPUs. We're seeing more and more operating systems, especially in the open source arena, and development is progressing rapidly. There's growing complexity in hardware and software, fast is has definitely increased a lot. The number and type of Internet protocols continues to grow, and security issues are gaining prominence. That can be tricky, because security measures must be well-integrated into a product in order to be truly effective.
The serial technology itself hasn't changed, but integrating it with these newer technologies can be a challenge. For example, it is getting more and more difficult to write drivers and firmware that cover the new operating systems and protocols. Customers will need serial communication solutions that can handle the new hardware and requirements, and it will require greater expertise on the part of product developers.
What other challenges do you see for manufacturers that work with serial technology?
 One of the key challenges for serial product manufacturers is differentiating your product from everyone else's. Since the market is so well-established, a lot of customers have the idea that all serial communication solutions are pretty much the same and end up comparing on price.
It can take some effort to convince customers of the benefits of true industrial-grade serial communication solutions. Users may not realize how significant the difference in quality and reliability can be between a consumer-grade product and a product designed for industrial use. There are a quite a few cheap competitors that use off-the-shelf ICs and third-party drivers, and for many applications, that's all you really need. But for industrial applications, we realized long ago that the turnkey approach could never deliver the quality that our industrial customers require.
That's why we invested so much time and effort in developing our own IC, the MoxaART chip, and our own drivers. We know the technology intimately because we developed it all ourselves, and we've spent years tuning it to deliver just what the market requires in performance and reliability. The turnkey solutions definitely have their place, but we often have to educate our customers on the value of using a truly industrial-grade solution.
Tell us about a particularly difficult issue that you worked on.
 A while back, we worked with a client in China that had a problem with one of our NPorts. On one of the serial ports, data wasn't coming through to the Ethernet side, and we had some trouble figuring out why.
We verified that the NPort hadn't crashed, and the serial port LEDs were lighting up. Since the pin assignments and cabling looked okay, we thought there might be a firmware issue with the NPort. However, we were unable to duplicate the NPort's behavior in our labs.
It was the serial data logs that ended up pointing us to the root of the problem. I noticed that some of the data didn't match what we were expecting to receive from the client's serial device, a modem that they had developed and installed themselves. We seemed to be getting framing errors, even though the communication settings matched between the NPort and the modem.
Framing errors are when a device sends data in a different format than the receiving device expects, so the data cannot be read correctly. Usually, framing errors would only be encountered for things such as cable noise or mismatched baudrate and data bit settings. In this case, the client's modem had some issues with data transmission quality, which resulted in the NPort encountering an unexpected and unforeseen type of error.
When we realized what the issue was, we were able to solve the problem with a modification to the NPort's firmware. Since we had designed everything ourselves, from the IC to the firmware to the drivers, we knew exactly what adjustments to make and how to make them. Very quickly, we were able to resolve the customer's issue without requiring any change to their architecture or devices, and we saved ourselves an expensive trip to China.
Are there any accomplishments in this field that you are particularly proud of?
There are two accomplishments that stand out for me personally. The first one is NPort Administrator, which became one of our most  well-received utilities.
The initial configuration of a device server can be tricky, because you need to connect it to your PC, look up the device server's default IP address, open your web browser, and connect to that IP address. You might even have to adjust the IP and subnet settings on the PC.
The NPort Administrator utility simplified configuration by automatically locating the NPort on the network, with just a click of the mouse. You didn't have to configure anything on your PC or on the NPort, and you didn't have to remember any IP addresses or subnet settings. It really made things a lot easier for users, and the feedback was so positive that we now offer similar utilities for our other product lines.
Another accomplishment that stands out for me involves our UPort line. One of our distributors received a phone call from a client with a desperate plea for help. The client begged him, "I need you to save my baby!"
It wasn't a real baby, but a medical training dummy that was outfitted with various sensors and devices for simulation purposes. The client used this training dummy in his presentations and needed to connect it to his laptop. Since his laptop didn't have a serial port, he needed to use a USB-to-serial adaptor, but there were problems with every single adaptor that he had tried. Finally, he begged our distributor to "save his baby", and our distributor suggested that he try our UPort 1110.
Not long after, the distributor received another call from the client, this time saying "You saved my baby!" He tried the UPort 1110 and it worked right away. Zero problems. After all the problems he had encountered with other products, the client was amazed by the UPort's quality, reliability, and ease of use. It was especially nice to hear this, because we had spent a lot of effort, about two years, developing the UPort. I was proud to see that our effort was paying off, and that there really was a market for high-quality, industrial-grade USB-to-serial products.
Special thanks to Casper Yang for volunteering his time and valuable insights. This interview was conducted on March 21, 2008, at the Moxa Inc. headquarters in Taipei, Taiwan.
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