I have PCMCIA CAN card I need to use with a laptop that does not have a PCMCIA slot. Is there a USB solution for this? Most things on Google reveal PCMCIA to USB (a PC card with USB ports). I did see this, but it's only for 3G wireless internet cards. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
USB to PCMCIA adapter
pcmciausb
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After 76 views and the superuser community not knowing about any techical reference or use case that could demonstrate if that will work, I'll treat the question as "excessively specific" and not contributive.
Anyway, if anyone is in the same case, and as @SmirksWhileWalkingWCabaretGirl pointed, a workaround for my needs is take advantage of the ExpressCard34 slot of the laptop and look for a CardBus to ExpressCard34 converter, which is more much easy to find and much more affordable.
Is it at all possible to have an external "drive" offering a PCMCIA slot, connected to my laptop by USB?
No. It is flatly not possible.
A PCMCIA slot - rather a CardBus slot in more recent laptops, although CardBus slots will take PCMCIA cards - is basically a PCI slot in compact, hot-pluggable form. You can have a USB controller that's a PCMCIA device (i.e. plugs into a PCMCIA slot), but you can't implement a PCMCIA slot with a USB device. (PCMCIA is older, and it's actually ISA-like rather than PCI, but the same principles apply.)
A device plugged into a CardBus slot has direct access (via DMA) to the host's RAM. And CardBus devices can be directly addressed as "memory" in the address space of the host CPU. (This is not at all the same thing as a "USB memory" stick; or an SD card, or the like; the "memory" in such devices does not appear in the host CPU's physical address space.)
These capabilities cannot be implemented in a USB device (i.e. a device plugged into a USB port). USB doesn't have any way for devices to do those things. Those concepts just don't exist on USB. There's not even any way in the USB protocol to ask for them. It would be like trying to use a can opener to wash the dog.
As you've noted, these slots are now obsolete, along with PCI. With PCI Express (PCIe) we have a new external slot called ExpressCard. What you need to do is find an ExpressCard equivalent for the PCMCIA (or maybe CardBus) card you used to use, and buy a laptop with an ExpressCard slot.
Either that, or buy old laptops on eBay or similar and keep using your existing cards.
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I have looked for similar device and found some listed here Adapters. One issue we have found is that some cards have issue with the adapter and do not read properly. Mostly older 16 bit cards not cardbus