Hello,

I recently bought an old second-hand Hook-µP by Rush Systems. It's a device that you can connect to a computer via RS-232 and that captures the IR beam of for example a HP 28. I understand that there is accompanying software that needs to be installed on the PC end in order to save the resulting data to a text file. Unfortunately, I don't have the software. I tried googling without success. Does anyone here have an idea how I can obtain of copy of the Hook-µP software?

Hello,

did you try HyperTerminal or a similar software?

You need specific software. The only thing in the Hook-up is the photodectector and amplifier; it outputs the demodulated signal, and isn't compatible with normal asynchronous serial data. The software has to bit-bang the decoding from one of the handshake lines. It is very sensitive to processor speed, and probably won't work on any PC made in the last 20 years.

Thanks for responding. So without the software and an old PC or luck with emulation, I merely have a fancy acrylic calculator stand....with a cable. Ah well, maybe I'll find the software sometime.

You could try Mark Adler's HPREAD, supplied as C source code. It defaults to assuming that the demodulator is connected to a pin of a parallel printer port, but there are command line arguments to specify the part number and bit position, so it should work with a serial handshake line if you can identify the right port and bit.

Mark wrote HPREAD to use a system timer, so it should work even on really fast systems. However, it won't work on Windows, so you'll have to boot DOS to use it.

Thanks for the tip. I'll give it a try.

Lute