A little further progress. Unlike the brandy new Pfeiffer for which I basically paid retail, this one is easy to communicate with as these things go. No ignorant windows CE board on the mass spec which does nothing but create a DCOM object the PC can manipulate (if you turn off all security settings on your network, doh, sounds like a great idea), with the PC still actually doing all the work because someone couldn't design a good system.
Nope, this is just a good 'ol z80 class cpu, serial communication, slow, reliable, simple. I'm just now writing the subroutines for the eventual nice gui program for it -- and am getting the real numbers so I can shove them into a database, something the Pfeiffer fancy home-brew badly documented scripting language doesn't seem to allow for, just saving files manuall,,,doh.
The main issues are that they were a little optimistic with that 9600 baud rate -- it's easy to over-swamp the thing and their xon-xoff proto, or DSR aren't even keeping that at bay, so I have to slow down the comm to its speed. Also, changing settings makes it restart a scan, and zero out the current one, so you have to figure out how to spin up in the PC and wait before asking for the data or you get garbage. Doing that without actually being in a spin loop in the PC and wasting cycles, while leaving the rest of the UI not locked up is a bit of a trick, but one I'm used to accomplishing.
So, soon we have the real deal, and mass spectra in the database along with the rest. Cool!