USR external faxmodem on RH9 ???

[Rick Stevens]

Thomas Dodd wrote:
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> 
> 
> Rick Stevens wrote:
> | Bassam ALHUSSEIN wrote:
> |
> |> ** THAT'S BAD NEWS !!!!!!!!!!!!
> |>
> |> Thanx for the quick answer ...
> |
> |
> | You might find a driver for it, but it appears to be a Conexant chipset.
> | Those are not supported.
> |
> | Do an "lsusb" command and look at the output (ignore any "timeout"
> | messages that pop up).  Find the entry for your modem and see if the
> | "idVendor" number is 0x0572 and the "idProduct" is "0x1232", "0x1233" or
> | "0x1234".  If it is, you're out of luck as Conexant hasn't released a
> | driver for it and apparently no one has gotten enough info from them to
> | write one themselves.
> 
> It would have been nice if could be programmed. My scanner is like that.
> The windows drivers upload firmware to the device. How hard would it be
> to make a modem that took firmware so it responded to Hayes commands?
> 
> Lazy developers? Just plain dumb?

Not that simple.  Winmodems typically rely on the system CPU to do most
of the stuff normally handled by the DSP chips such as error checking,
negotiation, etc.  The idea was to reduce the parts count (and hence the
cost), but since a serial-port 56K FAX modem costs $20, it's kinda
stupid at this point.  The parts can readily fit in a tiny amount of
real estate on the board.  It would be exceedingly simple to put a full
modem on board instead of bits and pieces and depend on the CPU to do
the work the modem should.  It'd also speed up the CPU.

> For what it's worth, There were a few PCI based modems that work. I know
> ActionTec made at least one model. The system just sees a serial port in
> the PCI slot.

Yes, that's true.  And the parts count on the boards are, what, five
chips?  Ridiculous!  Heck, Rockwell had a full 56k FAX modem in ONE
chip (I know, I designed a multi-line modem with 16 of them).
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-                       When in doubt, mumble.                       -
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