Instantly expand the I/O capacity of a PC without even opening the case of it. Save trouble in finding suitable PC plug in card and OS specific or language specific driver of the plug-in card. No more headaches in say, finding PC with ISA slot for ISA card or finding DOS driver for PCI I/Ocard. All these because Centipede100 works on one serial port which is commonly find in almost all model of PC.
Easy to use: user needs only to do simple serial port programming to read and write data from and to external device. No special driver and no headache in finding suitable driver to match different OS and different programming language. Minimum learning effort and no additional cost, as serial port function is available in on almost all commonly used programming language.
Expanding I/O capacity of any existing microprocessor based system easily without the need to upgrade the microprocessor nor redesign supporting address decode hardware and save the cost and effort for those extra works . There is no compatibility problem as Centipede100 works on serial port, what internal structure of its counterpart on the other side of the serial line port does not affect its operation at all.
Ready to use. No user programming to the on board processor is required for normal use. That means no need to know 8051 programming for using the board. However, the processor is on a DIP socket, power user may insert 8051 compatible with his software for the board to provide special behavior to meet his specific needs.
The board may be operated in polling mode; it sends back a data
block on each request. It can be operated in stream mode. Sending
data block at a rate about 10 times a second continuously.
Selected by DIP switch, Binary Protocol or ASCII Protocol can
be used. The former is good for microprocessor communication. The
latter is good for BASIC programming.
