Qemu connecting to specific guest UART device - serial-port

I emulate the firmware of a embedded device with qemu-system-arm. The output of the console is working fine by appending "console=ttyAMA0" to the kernel. On the guest there is a binary which opens another serial port for communication (bi-directional) on /dev/ttyGS0 and listens on that port. Now I need to connect to this port from the host, to send commands to the binary and receive the output.
I already tried different things like creating character devices and pseudo ttys, but I don't know how to define the serial device for the guest.
Is there a way to do this?
Thanks in advance.

If you pass multiple -serial options to QEMU they will be interpreted as defining what you want to do for UARTs 0, 1, 2, etc. So for example "-serial stdio -serial tcp::4444,server" will send UART 0 to your terminal and connect UART 1 to a TCP server on port 4444 which you can then connect to with netcat or similar utility. (You can connect serial output to a lot of different backends, not just stdio or TCP: check the QEMU documentation.)
(NB: this relies on your board model actually creating multiple UARTs and wiring them up to the command line options correctly, of course.)

Related

Programming Arduino's from a centralized location

I have 16 Arduinos that are in very tight spaces and hard to get to when I need to reprogram them with my FTDI cable. I would like to have or create some sort of centralized place where I can connect my FTDI cable, make some sort of selection (switch of some sort), which will then connect the pins my cable is on to the selected arduino.
Does anyone have any thoughts on how this can be accomplished? I've toyed with transistors, but that takes a lot of them and didn't quite work.
Are there any premade solutions that are out there that I have yet to find?
Thanks very much!
Here is a thought! TCP to Serial.
Sound complicated.
Not really.
Note from AVRDUDE's manual the following
For programmers that attach to a serial port using some kind of higher
level protocol (as opposed to bit-bang style programmers), port can be
specified as net:host:port. In this case, instead of trying to open a
local device, a TCP network connection to (TCP) port on host is
established. The remote endpoint is assumed to be a terminal or
console server that connects the network stream to a local serial port
where the actual programmer has been attached to. The port is assumed
to be properly configured, for example using a transparent 8-bit data
connection without parity at 115200 Baud for a STK500.
With this, One could place your Arduino's behind your choice of TCP to Serial Server. Which is available in several forms. Cisco has a gang TS (but that is expensive, unless used). lantronix (and others have single end point devices. But then for Linux, there is "Net2Ser" which can serve up all your ttyS (aka Serial/COM ports).
With the later you could use a raspberry or TP-Link TL-WR703N (
In the latest IDE 1.5.6r2 add one entry for each TCP-to-Serial Port to ./Arduino/hardware/arduino/avr/programmers.txt file. While replacing the IP and Port with corresponding values.
TCP2001.name=TCP 2001
TCP2001.communication=serial
TCP2001.protocol=stk500v1
TCP2001.program.protocol=stk500v1
TCP2001.program.tool=avrdude
TCP2001.program.extra_params=-Pnet:192.168.1.100:2001
TCP2002.name=TCP 2002
TCP2002.communication=serial
TCP2002.protocol=stk500v1
TCP2002.program.protocol=stk500v1
TCP2002.program.tool=avrdude
TCP2002.program.extra_params=-Pnet:192.168.1.100:2002
...
Additionally change "protocol" to "upload.protocol" the following line in ./Arduino/hardware/arduino/avr/platform.txt
tools.avrdude.program.pattern="{cmd.path}" "-C{config.path}" {program.verbose} -p{build.mcu} -c{protocol} {program.extra_params} "-Uflash:w:{build.path}/{build.project_name}.hex:i"
to
tools.avrdude.program.pattern="{cmd.path}" "-C{config.path}" {program.verbose} -p{build.mcu} -c{upload.protocol} {program.extra_params} "-Uflash:w:{build.path}/{build.project_name}.hex:i"
With this you can use "Upload Using Programmer" with the selected programmer to send over TCP, rather then use the Upload.
That all said, it will only work on Linux.
avrdude: ser_open(): network connects are currently notimplemented for Win32 environments

Serial port shown in device manager but unable to access/found?

I've installed the Arduino virtual USB serial port driver, it's appeared as COM4 on my device manager. I double checked by listing all available serial ports in powershell
> [System.IO.Ports.SerialPort]::getportnames()
COM1
COM4
However, when I try to do an echo to the serial port, it says it does not exist
> echo helloworld > COM4
The system cannot find the file specified.
I am trying to upload some firmware in to my arduino, but I kept getting denied by the port. Trying a different USB gives me the same result. I wrote a small program to test the serial port and I get the error:
The serial port "COM4" does not exist.
The device name of a serial port on Windows is \\.\COMn where n is the port number. A device driver can emulate the DOS device name, like "COM4" if it chooses to do so, very simple to do in the device driver code. But that's an increasingly rare thing to do, especially for port numbers larger than 2 and extra especially for port numbers larger than 4. So seeing your echo command fail is not unusual.
A serial port cannot be shared, it can only be opened once by a process and everybody else that tries to open it will get the fail-whale ERROR_ACCESS_DENIED error code. Necessarily so, serial ports sit at the very bottom layer of the OSI model, there is no protocol that arbitrates access to the port. Or to put it another way, the operating system has no guidance on who should get the data that the port receives. There can be only one candidate, the process that opened the port first. So the error message you got is not unusual, you have to make sure that nobody else is using the port. Including the Arduino serial port monitor.

Using socat to relay one TTY stream to multiple TCP/IP destinations, plus to one 'sniffer' program

Using an embedded Linux development board, I need to put together a widget that does the following:
Reads packets in via physical serial port, and relays those packets to a number of IP addresses (up to 20 of them; with IP destinations read from a configuration file).
Also 'sniff' those serial packets using a custom program, perhaps written in c.
As someone with a programming background, the most obvious solution (to me) would be to create a c program from scratch to achieve the above. However, as this is something I need to throw together quickly, and because I need an excuse to learn more about existing Linux command-line programs and script writing (which I'm not so good at), I'm wondering if much of this could be achieved with existing command-line programs and a shell script. Then, the only part I write from scratch is my packet sniffer (call it sniffer.c).
I understand that netcat and socat can be used for relaying between devices and addresses, and I have started experimenting with both. The thought occurs to me that I could avoid having to develop and test TCP/IP software by running multiple instances of socat to relay serial data from the TTY port to remote IP addresses. Each instance of socat could handle a particular remote IP address.
Does this sound feasible, and if so, how could I effectively 'multiplex' a stream from /dev/ttyS0 (say) as the source for multiple instances of socat plus one instance of sniffer.c? Could one way be to relay data read from /dev/ttyS0 to a cache file, and then have my socat instances and sniffer.c all have a read-only access to that file?

Serial input ok but output queue fails

I'm using Python 2.7, pySerial under windows 7.
I have 8 devices, they are connected to my PC via Virtual COM port (Silicon Labs CP210x USB to UART Bridge), I'm testing them With multiprocessing all 8 COM ports are open and each time i'm sending command to one unit only, there is no MultiThreading.
The problem is that after X time (it could be 10 minutes or 5 hours), the output Queue of the serial ports fails to send me responses. it's not a specific port each time it's a different port (it can be several ports)
It's importent to say, the device gets my command and do it. the fail is to get the response, The device i'm testing is OK for sure.
I am sniffing the port with Serial monitor, all the commands send OK and the device makes them, only it doesn't respond.
Any idea's ?
There could be n number of reasons:
Buffers might be full
Com Port is not working or might be
And finally the device is malfunctioning..
Check out these things might be it will help you.

USB to Serial emulation

I bought this magnetic strip reader writer (MSRE106) and I use USB adapter to connect it to my laptop because I have no serial port in my computer. But now I have a problem since the software of the device recognizes only serial ports on windows. After looking up I found someone that wrote a python script for Linux (found here The Script).
Still even in this python script in the settings file it has this variable
## Com port.
COM = "COM1"
How can I change this to be one of my USB ports instead of a serial one because I have none
This script is made to use serial port as well, which means you can't just modify COM="USB1" or whatever to use your USB adapter. If you have a look at line 264 a serial port is open using function SerialPort().
To fix this issue you must install your USB adapter's driver that will emulate a serial port and create a fake COM1 you can use with this script or the original software of the MSRE106.

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