Firewire to USB?
October 1, 2020 4:37 AM   Subscribe

We have some ancient lab equipment, namely a Zeiss camera from a microscope, that has a Firewire connector. Now the old computer connected to it died, and unfortunately we switched to leasing of our hardware, and those leased PCs can't be modified with PCI cards. There are Firewire to USB connectors, but I read those usually don't work. Is there any possibility to connect a Firewire 1394 device to a modern PC wihtout installing hardware like PCI cards in the computer? Btw, this is how the old computer did it, there is a PCI-E Firewire card in it.
posted by SweetLiesOfBokonon to Computers & Internet (13 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Well, you can buy a laptop with a FireWire port -- I've seen a couple-three HP EliteBooks on Newegg with i7s that still have them -- or an ExpressCard slot.

If your current PC has Thunderbolt, then StarTech has your back (somewhat expensively, granted).

But the Holy Grail Firewire-to-USB adapter doesn't exist.
posted by humbug at 5:16 AM on October 1, 2020 [1 favorite]


Yeah, Firewire acts as a PCI bridge, so you really need to have a bus interface for it to work.
posted by doomsey at 5:38 AM on October 1, 2020


Best answer: How old is the camera? Because that might be cheaper to replace than the interface, and cameras these days .... like this.
posted by Dashy at 6:41 AM on October 1, 2020 [1 favorite]


Just to combine what doomsey and humbug said: Thunderbolt is a PCI-Express bridge, and will likely have a lot of the bus access that a USB interface would lack, so that would work.
posted by ambrosen at 7:16 AM on October 1, 2020 [1 favorite]


Firewire can do things that conventional USB can't but Thunderbolt can, so the trick is getting a modern system with Thunderbolt and an adapter that's stable.
posted by Candleman at 7:53 AM on October 1, 2020


Best answer: Sorry, was sub-verbal earlier. Speaking as lab PI, I'd rather throw $300 at much improved camera than a specialty connection solution that itself will be obsolescent soon. I'm sure that whatever camera you can buy now will give you much better pub-quality images than the Zeiss cam, which was almost certainly overpriced to start with (I remember days of $5000 cameras!).
posted by Dashy at 8:09 AM on October 1, 2020 [4 favorites]


Best answer: ^ I feel similarly about audio interfaces. Quite nice FireWire ones exist and still work fine, but I'd rather spend money on a modern one than on the requisite StarTech gear to make the old ones work.

(That said, I have to deal with FireWire anyway because of MiniDV/HDV, but that's my situation. Most of us can ditch FireWire and be just fine.)
posted by humbug at 8:37 AM on October 1, 2020


If your new computer has Thunderbolt 3, you could get a TB3-PCIe expansion chassis and put a Firewire card in that.
posted by tomierna at 10:05 AM on October 1, 2020


If OP is asking about lab equipment, the cost of replacing it (both in terms of money and reworking the processes that user it) is probably way beyond "just swap out a different camera."
posted by Candleman at 10:56 AM on October 1, 2020


Sony made cables called i.Link which transported 1394 signals. Are there adapters?
posted by k3ninho at 4:16 PM on October 1, 2020


i.Link was just another word for FireWire. ("IEEE 1394" similarly.) No adapters, sorry.
posted by humbug at 4:22 PM on October 1, 2020


Best answer: If you're looking at $300+ for a thunderbolt to pci-e enclosure (not including the cost of the card and that's also assuming that you even have a thunderbolt-capable computer), then I'd suggest that it'd be cheaper and easier to outright buy a refurb PC matching or exceeding the specs of the one that died and stick a Firewire PCI-e card in that one. It's possible that you could even reuse the card out of the PC that died.
posted by Aleyn at 8:29 PM on October 1, 2020 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: OK, so I guess I will cannibalize the Firewire card from the old computer and buy a cheap PC from Amazon, they have office PCs for 86€, should be fine, after all it only needs to run one (old) program.
And before that, I'll look into what new cameras cost these days.
Thanks!
posted by SweetLiesOfBokonon at 12:31 AM on October 2, 2020 [2 favorites]


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