First post! Full disclosure, I have a very limited programming / pi background.
I'm working on a project to communicate with a Chroma Bi-Directional power supply (Model #: 62180D-1200) using LXI / SCPI communication. There's more I hope to do in the future, but for the time being I'm simply trying to establish a working communication channel using the "*IDN?" identify command. I have a raspberry pi connected to the same network as the power supply, which I am using to communicate to the 62180D.
Before beginning any of this testing, I have been able to establish that I can communicate with the device via http (web browser). The web page for the device even includes an scpi query tool -- which works!
Successful HTTP communication
To query the device from the pi I have used PuTty to log in to my pi and issue the following command:
lxi scpi -a <device ip address> "*IDN?"
I am expecting to see the same result as shown in the image above (Model No. , Serial No., Firmware Version), but instead I'm receiving the following:
Error: Read error (timeout)
Error: Failed to receive message
I was under the impression that this protocol is fairly plug and play. I have other LXI enabled devices on the same network that I am able to communicate with them using this same approach. Is there some obvious thing I'm missing here?
I'm trying to connect to a BTLE device from Linux from C++ with BlueZ.
Connecting to most devices works fine, but there is a special device which times out with 90% probability. From a standard Android smartphone the connection to this particular device works as intended.
For #Emil's advice in my other question (thanks!) I've setup a Link Layer sniffer tool for further investigation.
During the sniff period I tried connecting to the device(Destination) from both device(Good) and device(Bad).
Device(Good) is working perfectly - it connected
Device(Bad) is not working - timed out
Now I have a Link Layer data of both device connection trials and there is one significant difference between their trials:
Device(Good)'s LL Data for its CONNECT_REQ uses 500 for Timeout value (which is 625ms) while Device(Bad)'s LL Data in CONNECT_REQ uses 42 (which is 52.5ms).
I think Device(Destination)'s response is normally (mostly) arriving between those two, ie after 52.5ms and below 625ms, but sometimes it arrives in less than 52.5ms, and then also BlueZ can connect to it finally.
Is there any possibility to change this Timeout property for CONNECT_REQ in BlueZ? Maybe with setsockopt by any chance?
Or this is something hardcoded into kernel, even for bluetooth adapters attached to USB?
I have one desktop application which is communicating with another Device(Monitor) via serial to USB.
I have one communication board which is connecting both the application. It has chip from CP2100 family.
That communication board is powered up by Device(Monitor) and both the application start exchanging the data. But when I'm turn off the Device(Monitor), Port which is enumerated for desktop application is lost and when turn on the device(Monitor), port is comming back but in this case desktop application is not sending the data to Device(Monitor).
I have used serial port setting to get the current port for desktop application.
Please help me to solve this problem.
I would use this function to enumerate the COM port list and while not connected to a device, loop through the com list and try and connect. If you can connect, see if you get a response back you expect, if you do you know this is the right COM port, otherwise move onto the next COM port.
string[] serialPortNames = System.IO.Ports.SerialPort.GetPortNames();
This is a more constrained version of this question:
I have an embedded ARM device running a custom image with a Linux 3.10.0 kernel.
The only physical interface (no, USB, no Ethernet) is the default Linux shell which is connected one of the serial interfaces.
My question is: Is there any built-in or external tool that opens an IP tunnel over this connection?
I see some general issues:
The device is already use by Linux, so it must use stdin/out to communicate instead of accessing the device directly.
After starting the tunneling application, the application must wait for a tunnel client to connect because I need to close the serial connection on my computer and then start the tunnel client.
There should be a way to close the connection and go back to the normal shell
The actual requirement is, that I can access a REST interface that is running on the embedded device from a computer connected to the embedded device via serial cable.
This already works on devices with a physical Ethernet or Ethernet-over-USB but this device does not offer that.
[UPDATE]
As explained, socat is currently not available on our embedded device so as a first attempt, I used the following:
A Linux (Ubuntu) laptop with a physical serial interface
A Windows Laptop with a physical serial interface and cygwin+socat installed
Both connected via Null-modem cable
Note: I'm using a Windows laptop on one side because we will have the socat client running on Linux (unfortunately).
Direct STDIO Connection
Server
socat stdio file:/dev/ttyS0,b115200
Client
socat file:/dev/ttyS4,b115200 stdio
In cygwin, ttyS0 is COM1, ttyS4 in this case is COM5.
Using these, socat works like a little chat program. Why I type on one side is output on the other and vice-versa.
TCP Connection
The next step is to use a TCP connection.
Server
socat /dev/ttyS0,b115200,crtscts=1,raw,echo=0 tcp-connect:localhost:80
Client
socat -T2 file:/dev/ttyS4,b115200,crtscts=1,raw,echo=0 tcp-l:7777,reuseaddr
I specified the baud rate (115200), used raw transmission, no echo (The HTTP request would otherwise be sent back to the requester) using hardware flow control. Pus I had to use a timeout -T2 wich terminates the connection after 2s. Otherwise, curl does not terminate either and waits for more data.
When I use curl on the windows computer, it successfully transmits the request over serial connection and returns the complete HTTP response of the HTTP server on the Linux computer:
curl localhost:7777/index.html
However, it works only once. After the request is completed, both socatclient and server terminates.
Moreover, when I use a browser (Chorme), it uses g-zip encoding which most probably sends binary characters. And one of these characters will be a EOF character which again terminates socat before completing the request/response.
Then I tried to add fork to the server:
socat /dev/ttyS0,b115200,crtscts=1,raw,echo=0 tcp-connect:localhost:80,fork
This keeps the server alive, but curl returns a 400 Bad Request. So it seems as if the socat server initiated a request for each line or chunk since it does not understand HTTP.
IP Connection
Then I thought about going a layer below and using a TUN connection. However, this is not implemented on the Windows version of socat.
HTTP connection
Correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I understand, socatdoes not provide a connection type that actually understands HTTP and is able to serialize it properly over a serial connection.
So, I couldn't find any stable way to start both client and server and run multiple HTTP requests over the serial connection.
On a normal linux, you could use socat.
This program allows you to connect several stream types (file, socket, tcp, udp, ...). In your case it would be tcp to file or more precisely a tcp socket at port xx to /dev/ttyUSB1. You should launch socat on both sides to build a tunnel.
Edit 1:
Sorry I got also disappointed by socat. I can't find a solution that keeps my TCP listener active for multiple successive connections, but handles only one connection at a time.
My solution is a simple C# program that uses 4 threads:
1. wait for input on stdin e.g. exit command
2. the TCP listener
3. the TCP worker thread for a active connection
4. if TCP is open, it opens another thread for COM
Thread 3 reads from TCP and writes to COM and Tread 4 reads from COM and writes to TCP. If thread gets a TCP close event, it stops thread 4, which closes COMx, and exits it self. Now thread 2 can accept a new connection. If thread 1 reads exit on stdin, it passes a message to all threads to stop and shutdown.
Maybe you can implement such a short program in C with pthreads on your embedded system, which has no socat.
The EOF problem:
I tried to google for a program that escapes a special character or reencodes a data stream from ASCII to ANSI or base64 or whatever.... If you can find such a program or write it also in C you can pipe it in between
Server <=> reencode <=> socat <--serial--> socat <=> reencode <=> client
We've now solved the problem halfway using pppd. As it turns out, even Windows supports ppp. In contrast to socat, pppd actually uses a protocol that will have error detection included and it automatically creates network devices on the Linux and Windows system.
The only problem is, that pppd requires to have access to the serial device. There is no direct mode like the ppp tool provides.
We are now disabling the shell on demand, rebooting into IP-over-serial mode. When we are done, we reboot the system which automatically switch back to getty using the serial line.
The is not the prettiest solution but right now, it seems to work.
I have an interesting problem. I am working on an embedded box with multiple instances of Linux running each on an ARM processor. They are connected over internal 1GBps network. I have a serial port device node attached to processor A (Lets say Linux-A running on it). I have a program running on processor B (Lets say on Linux-B) access the serial port device as if it is attached to Linux-B locally.
My program invokes term i/o type api calls on device node to control tty echo, character mode input. What I am wondering is if there is a way to create a virtual serial device that is available on Linux-B somehow talking to real serial device on Linux-A over internal network.
I am thinking something along the lines of:
Linux-B has /dev/ttyvirtual. Anything that gets written to it gets transported over network socket to Linux-A serialserver. The serial server exrcises the api calls on real device lets say /dev/ttys0.
Any data waiting on ttys0 gets transported back to /dev/ttyvirtual.
What are all the things involved to get this done fast?
Thanks
Videoguy
Update:
I found a discussion at
http://fixunix.com/bsd/261068-network-socket-serial-port-question.html with great pointers.
Another useful link is http://blog.philippklaus.de/2011/08/make-rs232-serial-devices-accessible-via-ethernet/
Take a look at openpty(3). This lets you create a pseudo-TTY (like /dev/pts/0, the sort that ssh connections use), which will respond as a normal TTY would, but give you direct programmatic control over the connections.
This way you can host a serial device (eg. /dev/pts/5) that you forward data between a network connection, and then other apps can perform serial operations on it without knowing about the underlying network bridge.
I ended up using socat
Examples can be found here: socat examples
You socat back to back on both the machines. One listens on a tcp port and forwards data to local virtual port or pty. The socat on other box uses real device as input and forwards any data to tcp port.