For a project that uses sensors, I know serial ports can be used (that's what I do), however they're nowhere to be seen on recent machines (I have none on my portable computer, and cannot create one on it). Why are they being removed and what is used for sensors then ?
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My work involves interacting with legacy hardware that uses serial ports. I often have to monitor more than one serial line, and for the purpose I have a couple of the common USB serial adaptors. When I connect both of them to the same (Windows 10) machine, irregularities show up. Both ports show up in device manager, but only the first one that I plug in to the USB connector works. The other one indicates port not open when I try to send data via RealTerm.
I have also seen the situation where when I plug the second adaptor in, its port comes up, but the one for the other adaptor disappears. Does anyone know a way that two devices can happily coexist on the one machine? Thanks in advance.
Just ion case this helps anyone in the future......
The problem seems to be caused by the fact that one of the adaptors was coming in via a (powered) USB hub. When I liberated another native port on the machine so I could host both serial adaptors directly, everything worked fine.
Not worth hunting the cause down, a solution is at hand.
First of all, I won't go into details, cause there are a lot of them, and I dont want to write (a too long) essay. There is TL;DR section at the end, because I have a specific question, but maybe some additional info can help.
I have a device that is made of a GRU (glass room unit) and espressif (esp8266).
GRU and esp8266 communicate via serial, with GRU as master. GRU is programmed with an internal tool, and I can monitor everything on it, including the info it gets from esp8266.
There is a test/development device, that has espressif on top of the GRU, so I can easily take it off, reprogram/reconfigure it, and put it on.
Espressif is inside of a GRU, and downloading stuff to flash is a real pain. There is whole process including a OS switch (from Win7 to Linux and back). Console output on espressif cannot be done, or at least not in the time frame I have.
For esp8266 I use non-os SDK V2.0.0_16_08_10.
Espressif can be configured with downloading a configuration to flash, or via UDP (over a network if connected, over its AP if its not connected).
Algorithm for Wifi:
1. Try to connect to a network from configuration
2. If it succeeds, raise a flag for that
3. If it fails, enter dual (STATION+AP) mode and raise a flag for that
The reason espressif is not always in dual mode is that it affects multi-cast operations.
Configuration over network is done by a Java aplication I wrote.
Scenario 1
I've configured a wifi router, configured all (x19) of the devices (espressif in devices that is) to connect to its network. When I turned them on, they would connect one by one. The ones that didn't entered dual mode and could be configured via the app.
All well.
Scenario 2
I've wanted to test the system in real world, so I reconfigured them to connect to the our firms network. Additionally when I was already going thru the whole process I've downloaded latest firmare to flash.
I expected that they would connect or enter dual mode and create their own APs. But they did not.
I tested then the code and configuration on espressif whose console output I could monitor, and everything worked.
I tested then the code and configuration on the test device, and it worked again.
I've then redownloaded the code and configuration to one device, and it didn't work.
TL;DR
I have two devices, espressif on a GRU and espressif inside of a GRU. Both connected to one network. Esp on a GRU work for another, Esp inside of a GRU doesn't work for that other network.
They have identical code and configuration, so it shouldn't be a software issue.
Does having espressif inside of a device jams its signal enough that it can't go trough? Device is not big (5x5x2cm).
UPDATE 1:
While I was writing, the espressif inside of a GRU managed to connect to network. I then restarted it so I can check that it can do it again, and it can't connect again.
It took me about 10 minutes to write the whole question.
There are two things that seem to have caused the problem.
When I removed gpio_init(), network stuff became faster, much much faster. Everything on it, connecting to AP, creating AP etc...
I've changed my config and wifi code, so that it now stores the ap and station config to flash via API.
I only check if its internal config is the same as mine from flash. If it isn't, it saves it. Now, I only control the current opmode.
I have a number of Windows 2000 systems that we are trying to use to program the new Arduino Uno and Mega devices. These boards now come with a USB connection, an upgrade from the prior FTDI. I'm not able to download the Arduino code into the board from a Windows 2000 system
The supplied drivers are *.inf files that modify the standard USB driver that comes with Windows (in this case Windows 2000).
I go through the process of setting the port, setting the device and doing the download. The download fails, and the apparent error is that the PC can not communicate with the board. I've checked the port, adjusted the baud rates, etc. I've even moved the port number from a high port number (ie COM12) to a lower port (COM2) without any success. I do see activity on the rec/xmt lights on the Arduino board, so some type of data is being sent and received.
I'm looking for:
Someone who has been able to download files from Windows 2000 to the Arduino
or
A way to shim inside the USB driver to be able to watch the traffic going up and down to the board so I can continue to debug this.
or
Some general tips for things to look at in the .inf file that need to be set/not set to make it work on Windows 2000.
I know the boards work I've used them on a different set of Windows XP systems. So I know to some extent the install is good and that most of what I have works.
Full dumps can be found on the Arduino forum, http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1291090110/.
This is the information produced by the AVRDude program while it's trying to download the code.
this could be a long shot, but I jsut recentlz had problems uploading too. Fist of all, how long is the USB cabele you are uploading from? Mine in one case was too long and th arduino woul lose sync. Secondly, and this might just be a silly oversight (like i did) do you have things wired in the digital pin 0 and 1? These are used for the communication, and if there is anything else plugged in to them the upload will also fail.
As I said, long shot but those were two errors I had.
I have an Arduino-based device which connects through USB.
I'd like to detect it from my Qt 4 application, using QExtSerialPort (or whatever necessary), when it's plugged in.
If this weren't possible, I thought I could somehow get a list of the system's port names and just try all of them in search for my Arduino (where I'd implement some kind of handshaking procedure for it to detect it correctly). My concern in this approach is that I'm not sure if a device (for example, printer) would get damaged if I send some kind of handshaking ack at a different baud rate.
So, I don't really know where to start for any of them. Which would be the best approach? How would I implement it?
I believe you can find list of serial ports on Windows by looking into
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\HARDWARE\DEVICEMAP\SERIALCOMM
registry key
Each serial port on a UNIX system has one or more device files (files in the /dev directory) associated with it:
System Port 1 Port 2
IRIX® /dev/ttyf1 /dev/ttyf2
HP-UX /dev/tty1p0 /dev/tty2p0
Solaris®/SunOS® /dev/ttya /dev/ttyb
Linux® /dev/ttyS0 /dev/ttyS1
Digital UNIX® /dev/tty01 /dev/tty02
more details on serial programing on POSIX systems here
Since your device is USB, your UART port will be emulated by some kind of conversor in his hardware. So first you must understand what driver is being used on your system.
The most common SERIAL->USB conversor uses PL2303/PL2301 chip, so it would create a path on /dev, if its the first device, it will appear as "/dev/ttyUSB0", but you may also see the list reading the proc path (like "cat /proc/bus/usb/devices").
Under Windows it usually creates a virtual "COM", just go to device manager and check the port.
When you are sure about how the HW talks to your system, you may use QExtSerialPort for wrapping the system API and talk to the device.
Way too hard and too platform specific, using weird Windows Registry keys or rely on hard wired device nodes on Linux.
You are on the right way. Get QextSerialPort or QSerialDevice (which I preffer in my projects, because it got integrated in Qt5), have a look at the examples and simply use it. In both libraries you get some kind of port enumerator class which returns you a list of all configures serial ports. Only platform/device specific settings you will have to do manually (like getting RS485 in half-duplex mode on my current embedded project), but "standard" problems are perfectly encapsulated in a QIODevice implementation.
You can use both QextSerialPort and QSerialDevice like a file. Open it (instead of a filename you specify the device name ie. "COM1" on Windows or "/dev/tty0" on Linux, depending on your configuration) and then read or write like you are doing it with an ordinary QFile, QBuffer, Qwhatever-inherits-from-QIODevice.
If you have any problems opening the port and communicating, don't hesitate to ask! :)
I remember years ago my friend and i were playing command and conquer red alert and there was a mode were we put the others phone number and the game would dial up and connect. What was this called? and where can i find resource to program for this?
Dial-up Networking perhaps. You will have to learn how to control the modem. I remember there were some commands that looked like this: ATH0++ which was how you could make the modem do different things. Perhaps that will give you something to search for.
This resource looks kind of helpful: http://www.activexperts.com/activcomport/tutorials/modem/
One issue you might find is that there are two types of modems generally. One is an actual modem which is connected to your serial port. The other is what is typically known as a "winmodem" which is usually in a PCI slot and didn't have all of the functionality on the hardware but instead used the hardware drivers which typically only worked in Windows. MODEM stands for "MOdulator DEModulator" which means it just converts a digital signal to analog and vice versa.
In essence, it seems that if you can figure out how to program to the serial/com ports on your computer, you should be able to access the modem.
Another interesting link: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Serial_Programming:Modems_and_AT_Commands
Have a look at TAPI (Telephony API). In Windows world there is a set of APIs in the OS for this (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms737219(VS.85).aspx). The AT command set (Hayes commands) can also be used without TAPI in Windows if you treat your Modem as a COM port and send AT commands to that COM port (that's what actually TAPI does) but it isolates you from their different variants and also running initialization and other commands in a particular order.