Any experience in maximum USB cable length? If USB extenders are used, have you seen issues? My panel is a good 50-60 feet from the server cabinet I want to use for this.

I have had success with the Kensington USB over ethernet adapters (also sold under toy brand names). You should also be able to go 100ft/30m or more with USB over cat5 extenders.

Thanks. Forgot all about those. Appreciate the quick response.

And I forgot to mention another alternative. If the location of your ad2usb is near a computer running Linux or some bsd derivative (including the Mac) you can connect the ad2usb to the nearby box via usb and then connect to it over IP. Not only does this allow you to access the ad2usb over an IP network, but, you can share it between various client apps as well.

ad2usb over IP (vi ser2sock or Mono GUI sharing) is already is already supported by the Mono GUI and not very hard to support in the programming/scripting language of your choice.

Also, Sean has said he wants to port ser2sock to run on something like a cheap Linksys router. That'd be quite cool and an (possibly much less expensive) alternative to the usb-over-x products

There are a bunch of computers, including Linux machines running under VM, but nothing nearby, and I don't want to insert another possible failure point. But if there were one nearby, it would be a great idea! Thanks.

Preferable to run the alarm wire the length you need, then use a short usb cable


And for what it's worth - the current ser2sock compiles and runs fine on a router utilizing OpenWRT - you just need to know how to cross compile.

Kevin