I'm creating a virtual serial port using socat.
socat -d -d pty,echo=0,raw pty,echo=0,raw
That works as expected so far. Using echo/cat I can send/receice text etc.
But what about signal lines like DTR or RTS? How would I get / set the state of these lines with a pty? Is that even possible? I couldn't find any mentions about it anywhere.
socat is a pipe handler, basically lets you tap in the Tx and Rx "lines" without you having to care about signaling when data is ready/received.
The RTS/CTS/DSR/DTR are actual pins in a serial connector that control what is going on on the Tx/Rx lines.
Off the top of my head, I haven't used socat nor tried to do anything similar, lowest possible level I got was the EMV interface and protocol and sometimes I also netcat stuff real quick between machines when I'm too lazy to cp to a directory within httpd home... anyway, if you are trying to connect two entities with socat (separate machines, or applications on the same machine) you'll either use the same pipe and specify some control characters so they end up talking at the same time (got to make a note of this and try to implement it somehow with my wife), or use two separate pipes, one for Rx and one for Tx: Tx of entity 1 goes into Rx of entity 2, Tx of entity 2 goes into Rx of entity 1.
From your comment, it sounds like you want to control RTS/CTS independent of your data stream. You will have to write an application to interact with the serial port using ioctls.
I found this helpful forum post (with an example application)
https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/programming-9/manually-controlling-rts-cts-326590/
You can use hardware flow control lines (RTS/CTS):
socat stdio file:/dev/ttyAMA0,crtscts=1,b9600
Nowadays, this is mostly useful when talking to an RS485 transceiver, since that's the most common example of half-duplex serial line that is still in use. On some commonly used transceivers, such as the 75HVD12, the DE (drive enable) pin is connected to the host's RTS. There's also an active-low /RE (receive enable) pin that is connected to either RTS or CTS.
If you have access to GPIO, such as on a Raspberry Pi, you might be able to assign DTR and DSR to an output and input pin respectively. Alternatively, an USB adapter such as FTDI232 will assert DTR if it is connected to a computer.
Related
Using BlueZ, which
is the official Linux Bluetooth stack
I'd like to know which of the below two methods are better suited for detecting a device's presence in the nearby.
To be more exact, I want to periodically scan for a Bluetooth device (not BLE => no advertisement packets are sent).
I found two ways of detecting it:
1.) Using l2ping
# l2ping BTMAC
2.) Using hcitool
# hcitool name BTMAC
Both approaches working.
I'd like to know, which approach would drain more battery of the scanned device?
Looking at solution #1 (l2ping's source):
It uses a standard socket connect call to connect to the remote device, then uses the send command to send data to it:
send(sk, send_buf, L2CAP_CMD_HDR_SIZE + size, 0)
Now, L2CAP_CMD_HDR_SIZE is 4, and default size is 44, so altogether 48 bytes are sent, and received back with L2CAP_ECHO_REQ.
For hcitool I just have found the entrypoint:
int hci_read_remote_name(int dd, const bdaddr_t *bdaddr, int len, char *name, int to);
My questions:
which of these approaches are better (less power-consuming) for the remote device? If there is any difference at all.
shall I reduce the l2ping's size? What shall be the minimum?
is my assumption correct that hci_read_remote_name also connects to the remote device and sends some kind of request to it for getting back its name?
To answer your questions:-
which of these approaches are better (less power-consuming) for the remote device? If there is any difference at all.
l2ping BTMAC is the more suitable command purely because this is what it is meant to do. While "hcitool name BTMAC" is used to get the remote device's name, "l2ping" is used to detect its presence which is what you want to achieve. The difference in power consumption is really minimal, but if there is any then l2ping should be less power consuming.
shall I reduce the l2ping's size? What shall be the minimum?
If changing the l2ping size requires modifying the source code then I recommend leaving it the same. By leaving it the same you are using the same command that has been used countless times and the same command that was used to qualify the BlueZ stack. This way there's less chance for error and any change would not result in noticeable performance or power improvements.
is my assumption correct that hci_read_remote_name also connects to the remote device and sends some kind of request to it for getting back its name?
Yes your assumption is correct. According the Bluetooth Specification v5.2, Vol 4, Part E, Section 7.1.19 Remote Name Request Command:
If no connection exists between the local device and the device
corresponding to the BD_ADDR, a temporary Link Layer connection will
be established to obtain the LMP features and name of the remote
device.
I hope this helps.
I'm trying to send files over a half-duplex interface (RS-485) between a box PC running debian (4.19) and a SBC with an im6xDL.
Thanks to this community I can successfully transfer simple data between the units using picocom or by echoing/reading.
The box PC supports half-duplex RS-485 natively and has automatic RTS functions so that you can read/send data without any issue. The SBC on the other hand needs to be toggled to change into RX or TX mode.
This turned out to be a problem when I tried to send files from the box PC to the SBC.
On the box PC:
picocom /dev/ttyUSB0 -b 9600 -fn
C-a,C-S
***file: /home/user/test.txt
Transfer incomplete
*** exit status: 128
On the SBC
picocom /dev/ttymxc2 -b 9600 -fn -et
C-a,C-r
Terminal ready
�000000
As you can see something is terribly wrong, it is like it cannot interpret the bits when a file is being transferred.
My questions:
Is it possible to send files from the command line in half-duplex systems? (The SBC needs to be in RX mode the entire time).
Is there another way to achieve this that is more intuitive?
As always, thanks for the help and support :)
/W
See here:
Pymodbus - Read input register of Energy meter over rs485 on uart of raspberry pi3
The solution I presented there using pylibmodbus should work for any hardware with UART and one or two GPIO lines accessible from user space in Linux.
If, on the other hand, what you want to do is use something like picocom or minicom then you can take a look at the hardware-only solution using a 555 timer.
Of course, if prototyping circuits is not for you, you can always buy a USB to RS485 with half-duplex support. You have many available but those based on the MAX13487 IC seem to work very well.
EDIT: The solution using the 555 timer is not in the post I linked above but here together with some more background material on half-duplex RS485 links: RS485: Inappropriate ioctl for device
Does anyone know of a good way to get a bi-directional dump of MIDI SysEx data on Linux? (between a Yamaha PSR-E413 MIDI keyboard and a copy of the Yamaha MusicSoft Downloader running in Wine)
I'd like to reverse-engineer the protocol used to copy MIDI files to and from my keyboard's internal memory and, to do that, I need to do some recording of valid exchanges between the two.
The utility does work in Wine (with a little nudging) but I don't want to have to rely on a cheap, un-scriptable app in Wine when I could be using a FUSE filesystem.
Here's the current state of things:
My keyboard connects to my PC via a built-in USB-MIDI bridge. USB dumpers/snoopers are a possibility, but I'd prefer to avoid them if possible. I don't want to have to decode yet another layer of protocol encoding before I even get started.
I run only Linux. However, if there really is no other option than a Windows-based dumper/snooper, I can try getting the USB 1.1 pass-through working on my WinXP VirtualBox VM.
I run bare ALSA for my audio system with dmix for waveform audio mixing.
If a sound server is necessary, I'm willing to experiment with JACK.
No PulseAudio please. It took long enough to excise it from my system.
If the process involves ALSA MIDI routing:
a virtual pass-through device I can select from inside the Downloader is preferred because it often only appears in an ALSA patch bay GUI like patchage an instant before it starts communicating with the keyboard.
Neither KMIDIMon nor GMIDIMonitor support snooping bi-directionally as far as I can tell.
virmidi isn't relevant and I haven't managed to get snd-seq-dummy working.
I I suppose I could patch ALSA to get dumps if I really must, but it's really an option of last resort.
The vast majority of my programming experience is in Python, PHP, Javascript, and shell script.
I have almost no experience programming in C.
I've never even seen a glimpse of kernel-mode code.
I'd prefer to keep my system stable and my uptime high.
This question has been unanswered for some time and while I do not have an exact answer to your problem I maybe have something that can push you in the right direction (or maybe others with similar problems).
I had a similar albeit less complex problem when I wanted to sniff the data used to set and read presets on an Akai LPK25 MIDI keyboard. Similar to your setup the software to setup the keyboard can run in Wine but I also had no luck in finding a sniffer setup for Linux.
For the lack of an existing solution I rolled my own using ALSA MIDI routing over virmidi ports. I understand why you see them as useless because without additional software they cannot help at sniffing MIDI traffic.
My solution was programming a MIDI relay/bridge in Java where I read input from a virmidi port, display the data and send it further to the keyboard. The answer from the keyboard (if any) is also read, displayed and finally transmitted back to the virmidi port. The application in Wine can be setup to use the virmidi port for communication and in theory this process is completely transparent (except for potential latency issues). The application is written in a generic way and not hardcoded to my problem.
I was only dealing with SysEx messages of about 20 bytes length so I am not sure how well the software works for sniffing the transfer of large amounts of data. But maybe you can modify it / write your own program following the example.
Sources available here: https://github.com/hiben/MIDISpy
(Java 1.6, ant build file included, source is under BSD license)
I like using aseqdump for that.
http://www.linuxcommand.org/man_pages/aseqdump1.html
You could use virtual midi devices for this purpose. So you have to load snd_seq_dummy so that it creates at least two ports:
$ sudo modprobe -r snd_seq_dummy
$ sudo modprobe snd_seq_dummy ports=1 duplex=1
Then you should have a device named Midi through:
$ aconnect -i -o -l
client 0: 'System' [type=kernel]
0 'Timer '
1 'Announce '
client 14: 'Midi Through' [type=kernel]
0 'Midi Through Port-0:A'
1 'Midi Through Port-0:B'
client 131: 'VMPK Input' [type=user,pid=50369]
0 'in '
client 132: 'VMPK Output' [type=user,pid=50369]
0 'out '
I will take the port and device numbers form this example. You have to inspect them yourself according to your setup.
Now you plug your favourate MIDI Device to the Midi Through ports:
$ aconnect 132:0 14:0
$ aconnect 14:0 131:0
At this time you have a connection where you can spy on both devices at the same time. You could use aseqdump to spy the MIDI conversation. There are different possibilities. I suggest to spy the connection between the loopback devices and the real device. This allows you for rawmidi connections to the loopback devices.
$ aseqdump -p 14:0,132:0 | tee dump.log
Now everything is set up for use. You just have to be careful about port names in your MIDI application. It should read MIDI data from Midi Through Port-0:B and write data to Midi Through Port-0:B.
Some additional hint: You could use the graphical frontend patchage for connecting and inspecting the MIDI connections via drag and drop. If you do this you will see that every Midi Through port occurs twice once as input and once as output. Both have to be connected in order to make this setup work.
If you want to use GMidiMonitor or some other application you spy on both streams intermixed (without showing the direction) using aconnect suppose 129:0 is the Midi Monitor port :
$ aconnect 14:0 129:0
$ aconnect 132:0 129:0
If you want to have exact direction information you could add another GMidiMonitor instance that you connect only to one of the ports. The missing messages come from the other port.
What about using gmidimonitor? See http://home.gna.org/gmidimonitor/
I have a device that takes low current 3-12v input signal to do it's magic and I would like to interface it to my linux box. What kind of options do I have on this? It would be great to have some low-cost possibly user-space solution.
If I understand right, you need to control your box by changing 3-12v input signals to it. Here's the choices I can think of from the top of my head:-
a: Using RS232 serial handshake lines. RTS/CTS can usually controlled programatically as "on/off" signals without driver development using IOCTL calls.
b: Use a "GPI dongle" such as the Advantech ADAM range. These typically take serial or TCP/IP inputs and convert them to suitable output signals.
c: You may be able to do something with a parallel printer port if your PC stil has such a thing.
As shodanex says, be aware that RS232 levels are NOT directly compatible with TTL/CMOS inputs so you may need some minor level shifting/clamping electronics to fix this.
I'm debugging communications with a serial device, and I need to see all the data flowing both directions.
It seems like this should be easy on Linux, where the serial port is represented by a file. Is there some way that I can do a sort of "bi-directional tee", where I tell my program to connect to a pipe that copies the data to a file and also shuffles it to/from the actual serial port device?
I think I might even know how to write such a beast, but it seems non-trivial, especially to get all of the ioctls passed through for port configuration, etc.
Has anyone already built such a thing? It seems too useful (for people debugging serial device drivers) not to exist already.
strace is very useful for this. You have a visualisation of all ioctl calls, with the corresponding structure decoded. The following options seems particularly useful in your case:
-e read=set
Perform a full hexadecimal and ASCII dump of all the data read from
file descriptors listed in the
specified set. For example, to see all
input activity on file descriptors 3
and 5 use -e read=3,5. Note that this
is independent from the normal tracing
of the read(2) system call which is
controlled by the option -e
trace=read.
-e write=set
Perform a full hexadecimal and ASCII
dump of all the data written to file
descriptors listed in the specified
set. For example, to see all output
activity on file descriptors 3 and 5
use -e write=3,5. Note that this is
independent from the normal tracing of
the write(2) system call which is
controlled by the option -e
trace=write.
I have found pyserial to be quite usable, so if you're into Python it shouldn't be too hard to write such a thing.
A simple method would be to write an application which opened
the master side of a pty and the tty under test. You would then
pass your tty application the slave side of the pty as the 'tty device'.
You would have to monitor the pty attributes with tcgetattr() on the pty
master and call tcsetattr() on the real tty, if the attributes changed.
The rest would be a simple select() on both fd's copying data bi-directionally and copying it to a log.
I looked at a lot of serial sniffers. All of them are based on the idea of making a virtual serial port and sniff data from that port. However, any baud/parity/flow changes will break connection.
So, I wrote my own sniffer :). Most of the serial ports now are just USB-to-serial converters. My sniffer collects data from USB through debugfs, parse it and output to the console. Also any baudrate changes, flow control, line events, and serial errors are also recorded. The project is in the early stage of development and for now, only FTDI is supported.
http://code.google.com/p/uscmon/
Much like #MBR, I was looking into serial sniffers, but the ptys broke the parity check. However, his sniffer was not helping me, as I'm using a CP2102, and not a FT232. So I wrote my own sniffer, by following this, and now I have one that can record file I/O on arbitrary files: I called it tracie.