Advantech PCI-1612B

came across a few Advantech PCI-1612B cards - What are the most common practical application?

Can their for instance be used with LinuxCNC?

Looking up the data sheet for it. It appears to be a 4 port serial port card. It could be used for connecting serial devices. But those connections likely will not be real time capable. Mot common usage might be controlling a VFD via Modbus interface. This is assuming the available drivers for it are compatible with Linuxcnc.

It doesn't appear to be particularly useful for Linuxcnc.

I wrote a driver for the Advantech PCL720 IO card, and it wasn't hard to do. However that was a much more obviously-useful card.

Thanks, again Andy for writing that PCL-720 driver for me. We are still using it, but only for GPIO, the step generation has been handed off to a Mesa 5i25.

Advantech does make lots of interesting and potentially useful looking stuff that could possibly be pressed into service for Linuxcnc, DAC cards, Encoder counters, digital I/O,... but a serial card on the surface doesn't seem to have a lot of potential.