For those of you who went and got the radioshack kit, and purchased the usb to serial adapter instead of the serial cable; does your predator get powered by just the usb-serial cable or do you have to plug it in to the car or a power adapter?

I have the usb-serial cable, and it does not power the predator. I thought USB ports were powered.

 

Not necessarily...USB 2 can provide some power to devices designed to take advantage of that.

Since your converting a serial device, no you can't power the unit with it as a serial connection provides no power.

The tuner wasn't designed with USB power in mind.

Be glad that you can use transfer data with it, sometimes those usb-serial adapters don't work either.

 

I believe the hot set up would be to plug the Predator into the vehicle and connect the serial cable to your laptop which is battery operated. That would save the cost of the 12V adapter. Unfortunately I only have a desktop PC - so 12V adapter with USB to serial cable it is.

 

thats what I am doing


I have my laptop, which has wireless internet, plugged in to the predator...which is then plugged in to the car. So from my driveway, I can have my latop monitoring the car, connect to the internet to check for updates, and access the TMS.com forums for help.

But I can't hook the predator up to my desktop to update it, without the ac adapter.

 

Serial does not support power.

Why would you want to do this anyway? The baud rate won't be any higher than the serial port supports. I think you would be wasting $$$ to convert to USB.

 

Probably because a lot of computers no longer have serial ports. None of mine do.

 

I converted mine to USB for that reason (no serial ports). The Predator works great in the USB. No problems; however, the information is correct that you can not power the unit with the USB.

 

ok, thanks for clarifying everyone. I thought maybe my usb ports were screwed up or something.

 

I want to go this route as well and have my laptop in the computer with wireless. What USB cable do I need from say RadioShack?

 

I just asked for a serial to usb cable. They had only one kind. Works great.

Wireless internet to the laptop....usb-serial cable to the predator....from predator to the car.

Works awesome. Especially for monitoring the car while driving.

 

Cool I will just go in and ask for a Serial to USB. How does the monitoring work? Does it save the data or is it realtime?

 

You can monitor it in real time. not sure about saving it.