300ft of USB?

Akilae729

I need to run a USB powered device (specifically a NI DAQ) approximately 300ft from the host computer.

What the best way to do this?

Should I use a USB repeater, or convert to an Ethernet cable for the long distance and then convert back to USB?

GnomeTank

You'd want a repeater, USB degrades pretty bad at that distance. You could also do Ethernet, but unless you're running a gigabit setup, you're not going to get throughput of USB 2.0 (if that even matters to you).

bowen

http://thejournal.com/articles/2011/06/07/new-kits-extend-usb-2.0-300-feet.aspx

Might be of use? But yeah repeaters is pretty much the only other way to do this.

ecco the dolphin

Personally, I'd be tempted to run acquisition on a laptop, and send the results over ethernet.

Or is this feedback for a closed loop/control system?

Phyphor

Yeah... I do USB development and I have to deal with people wanting to do this crap... there's no good way to make it work. The repeaters will eventually fail and cause strange errors. Your best bet is seriously to use a closer computer, if you can't do that at all just get one of those things that convert usb to ethernet and back at the other end

Akilae729

Phyphor wrote: »

Yeah... I do USB development and I have to deal with people wanting to do this crap... there's no good way to make it work. The repeaters will eventually fail and cause strange errors. Your best bet is seriously to use a closer computer, if you can't do that at all just get one of those things that convert usb to ethernet and back at the other end

Something like this?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812125019

We were looking at a long USB cable as the easier option actually. It's either this or we run 20 channels worth of analog data over the same distance.

BlazeFire

I don't think that Newegg link is what you are looking for. I believe the other replies were talking more about something like this: http://www.ebay.com/itm/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=280837173760

However, that link says it is only good for up to 40m (~120ft). If you could tell us more about the setup maybe someone will have a better idea?

Akilae729

BlazeFire wrote: »

I don't think that Newegg link is what you are looking for. I believe the other replies were talking more about something like this: http://www.ebay.com/itm/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=280837173760

However, that link says it is only good for up to 40m (~120ft). If you could tell us more about the setup maybe someone will have a better idea?

This is what I was looking for.

Basically we have a cooling system and a pump vault that are monitored by a central control computer. NI USB-6210 cards handle the data acquisition and will hopefully feed that information back to the central computer.

According to this

http://lavag.org/topic/11299-extending-a-daq-usb-cable-100ft/

these apparently can do the job.

http://www.icron.com/products/usb_new/usb20_ranger_2101_2104.php

After going back out and re-meauring, we are probably closer to 200ft than 300ft. It just a little hard to tell because we are snaking the cables through a bunch of HVAC wall cut outs and along existing hardware.