Question regarding Citrine...

Larry · Post by **Larry** » Wed Oct 05, 2011 9:08 am

Does anyone here know if you can hook up the Citrine to a laptop
through a USB port? With the Citrine comes a lead with a 9-pin
female adaptor. My laptop cannot receive this adaptor, but I can connect
via a 9-pin/USB adaptor, thus connecting to one of the laptop's USB
ports. But the Citrine and the laptop would not recognize each other this way

Anyone else here had the same trouble?... and if so is there a workaround?
Hope I've made it clear enough and any help would be appreciated,
thanks,
Larry
PS I can have Citrine control Arena through my PC ok, because the PC box
has a 9-pin male jack in the back, but I want the portability of the laptop.

SirDave · Post by **SirDave** » Wed Oct 05, 2011 5:11 pm

Larry, there can be a number of things at play here. Two important factors are the cable itself, particularly the drivers included, and the set up of the COM ports.

Take the 'easy' one (COM ports) first: Your PC already has set a COM port (likely COM1 to COM3) for your built in 9-pin serial port which works with the Citrine, but the drivers provided with the cable you're using with the laptop may set the COM port to something that doesn't work with the Citrine (which may prefer something like COM1-3). For instance, the XP driver for one cable from Cables-To-Go sets it to COM9 (meaning that one would have to change it to COM1 to COM3 for it to work with many applications). So, if this may be the case, you will have to change the COMport of your cable. This may be tricky. Possibly you can do it thru Device Manager by looking under the Univeral Serial Ports section for you particular cable's entry, then look under Properties. Some manufactures may also put an entry in Control Panel where you can change things like comports.

You might want to do a little googling on COM ports to understand this a little more. I have a feeling that that is your problem here.

The driver issues are more problematic. Some USB->serial cables provide defective drivers depending on what your PC is running ie. XP, Vista, Win7 etc. For instance, the Iogear cable provides an XP driver that often doesn't work whereas people have had good luck with the Cables-To-Go cable if they are running WinXP.

All that said, using USB to connect to legacy ports has always involved some hocus pocus.

Bryan Whitby · Post by **Bryan Whitby** » Wed Oct 05, 2011 6:10 pm

Hi Larry
I've connected the Citrine to a tablet pc as can be seen on my web site (Le Grande Citrine Arena).
http://bryanwhitbycomputerchess.yolasite.com/
It's connected by a 9 pin / usb adaptor and worked great but with only Windows 98. I couldn't get it to work with Windows XP.
Regards
Bryan

Larry · Post by **Larry** » Wed Oct 05, 2011 11:41 pm

Thanks for the answers, guys. Forgot to mention, I use WinXP. Maybe
it's best, for the meantime, I just content myself with using Citrine with
the PC. After all, it does has a *much* bigger screen.
LH