USB and Firewire Extension Cables

[Jonathan]

Extensions extensions extensions. Got some amazing devices you need to connect and running into distance problems? Well here’s a list of some common connection types and what you can do to extend them.

First we’ll start with USB extension cables. USB can only be extended up to 15 feet unless you use some sort of active extender.

The passive 6 foot extension is great if you just need a few more feet. You can see it here:
USB extension cable

If you need to go further you can use the 16 foot USB 2.0 active extension cable. This cable has a built in repeater that is self powered by the USB bus. These can also be daisy chained to give you up to an 80 foot extension.
16 Foot USB active extension cable

Need some USB 1.1 ports a long ways away from your computer? You can use a USB over CAT5 extender. This box will convert the usb connection to common CAT5 ethernet cable. Then at the other end it will give you a 4 port USB 1.1 hub up to 150 feet away.
USB 1.1 Ethernet extender

Now let’s look at some firewire extension cables. Firewire also has the same limitation as USB, it can only be extended up to a 15 foot cable unless you use an active extension.

We have a 14.5 foot active extension cable that is 6-pin male to female. This cable also has a bus powered booster built into it (Note: they must be plugged into a 6-pin firewire port on the pc for it to get power. They do not work with 4-pin computer ports.) These can be daisy chained up to a total of 60 feet. They are capable of running the FireWire 400 speed.
14.5 foot Firewire active extension

If you need to go further, or want to power a device while plugging into a 4-pin firewire port on your computer, you can use our firewire repeaters. You can see Mark’s post about those here:
Running long firewire extensions

And for those of you that still have some important serial devices kicking around let’s look at serial extensions.

Unlike firewire and USB, serial can be extended very far without any boosters. We have extension cables from 6 feet to 100 feet. The 100 foot is shown here:
DE9 (DB9) Serial extension cable

For those of you who want to use easy to run cat5 cable to run you serial extension, you can use these serial to rj45 modulators.
Serial to RJ45 modulator

There’s a great product for sharing a serial device with lots of computers. And the great thing is it does it over a wireless network connection. The adapter fully supports 64-bit and 128-bit WEP and WPA wireless security standards.
Wireless Serial device server

Any questions?

[mark]

I can't figure out why there aren't cat5 firewire extenders.  If anyone sees one, drop us a note.

I think I saw a firewire extender over fiber optic cables once.  but they are hard to find too.

[Ryan]

I can't figure out why there aren't cat5 firewire extenders.  If anyone sees one, drop us a note.

I think I saw a firewire extender over fiber optic cables once.  but they are hard to find too.

I'm not completely sure but I think there might be something to do with the signal that you send over firewire that will get corrupt over cat5 over long distances but it isn't affected in fiber optics.  You can get the firewire extender over fiber at Sewelldirect.com.

[Ryan]

Well it looks like I was mistaken.  I found this firewire extender over cat5 although it cannot go nearly as far as with fiber optics, but that is true with just about any extender.

[Ivan]

preved