I bought a COP-USA CD55 outdoor speed dome, and I'm planning to use it with a Geovision 8.2 system. I do have it set up and working from within Geovision, but I do not see a way to to access the menu system of the camera from within the Geovision software. That involves sending special custom control commands to the camera over the RS485 bus, which Geovision either does not support (or I cannot find it in the lousy GV config menus).

I assume I could get a separate program vaguely like Hyperterminal, and just directly talk to the camera over the RS485 bus, setting it up with a standard NTSC monitor. It looks like a very simple and free program could do everything I need.

However this type of program is totally unknown to me, and as far as I can tell Windows Hyperterminal will not work to talk to the camera, since there's no way to specify the camera address on the RS485 bus attached to the COM port.

- Javik

There is a trick to do it with the CD55. I forget what preset number it is, but you can engage the menu by setting that preset and calling it twice I believe.

You can transmit the commands over standard hyperterminal. The second byte contains the camera address if you feel like punishing yourself.

Buy from them small very inexpensive stand alone PTZ controller
much better then any software plus much easier to control camera

Hate to sprout Bosch again, but thats why the Bilinx opiton is cool, programmed up the coax and run through software