I am connected on my embedded device with the serial port and would like to start my custom binaries on boot and be able to see the output generated.
My /etc/inittab file contains:
console::respawn:/sbin/getty -L 115200 ttyAPP3 vt100
console::respawn:/usr/bin/mybinary
With this configuration, I can see the output of mybinary in the serial console but It is difficult/impossible to connect (insert login and password) to getty because of the interference of the output generated.
I tried to switch the output in inittab to another not used tty (tty10) like this:
console::respawn:/sbin/getty -L 115200 ttyAPP3 vt100
tty10::respawn:/usr/bin/mybinary
And now I can connect but how can I see the output generated to /dev/tty10 ?
I tried cat /dev/tty10 but nothing is shown.
I know the question is old, but it has no answers at all for crying out loud.
Remember that a TTY is both an output device and also an input device -- by cat'ing from it you're reading input from the terminal which means the keyboard, NOT the screen.
I don't know if there's a parallel in other *nixes, but Linux systems have /dev/vcsX and /dev/vcsaX character devices (nodes c,7,0+X and c,7,128+X respectively) for each /dev/ttyX device - these are mirrors of the data currently on the output of the TTY device (ie. the screen part of the TTY, not the keyboard part). These will give you what you're looking for. The vcsaX devices will give you a displaybyte+attributebyte pair (i.e. the foreground/background text colour -- see other references for more information on text attribute bytes) for each character on the screen, while the vcsX devices give only the displaybyte for each character. Of course it's a raw stream/dump so if the row and/or column count of your terminal doesn't match that of the the TTY you're dumping then you'll need to parse the data and reformat it to match.
tl;dr: use "cat /dev/vcs10"
Hope that helps.
Related
I am building some kind of kiosk system and I bought this USB DIY keyboard for it: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07QPXQQ7L
This allows me to have a lot of buttons and they behave like keyboard keys.
I'm writing a program (Perl) that will take the input from that keyboard and do things based on that.
The problem is that I need to have the rest of the system (both X and the TTYs) ignore that keyboard so that it won't type random things in the terminal or in the window manager. In other words, the system should disregard it but the device itself must still be available in /dev/input/...
I don't need a real keyboard to control the machine because I connect via VNC and SSH.
Bonus points if you know how to read from a /dev/input/... keyboard and end up with letters typed just like with STDIN in a terminal.
Thanks!
I found the solution here where someone wanted the exact same thing in the case of a barcode reader:
https://serverfault.com/questions/385260/bind-usb-keyboard-exclusively-to-specific-application/976557#976557
SUBSYSTEM=="input", ACTION=="add", ATTRS{idVendor}=="xxxx", ATTRS{idProduct}=="yyyy", RUN+="/bin/sh -c 'echo remove > /sys$env{DEVPATH}/uevent'"
ACTION=="add", ATTRS{idVendor}=="xxxx", ATTRS{idProduct}=="yyyy", SYMLINK+="diykeyboard"
And then replace xxxx and yyyy by the Vendor and Product ID as found in lsusb. So in my case 1c4f and 0002:
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 1c4f:0002 SiGma Micro Keyboard TRACER Gamma Ivory
The udevadm control --reload thing didn't do it for me, I had to reboot.
Then in theory the data typed on the keyboard should be available at /dev/diykeyboard (the SYMLINK variable).
Now in my case unfortunately there are multiple events that match this vendor+product, and to match the right one I needed to add DEVPATH=="*:1.0/*", KERNEL=="event*" in the second line where it creates the SYMLINK. And then surprise it did not create the link in /dev so I had to do something dirty, create a link myself with ln:
SUBSYSTEM=="input", ACTION=="add", ATTRS{idVendor}=="1c4f", ATTRS{idProduct}=="0002", RUN+="/bin/sh -c 'echo remove > /sys$env{DEVPATH}/uevent'"
SUBSYSTEM=="input", ACTION=="add", ATTRS{idVendor}=="1c4f", ATTRS{idProduct}=="0002", DEVPATH=="*:1.0/*", KERNEL=="event*", RUN+="/bin/sh -c 'ln -sf /dev/input/$kernel /diykeyboard'"
(don't create the link in /tmp since udev happens before the mounting of /tmp at boot)
From there I can read from /diykeyboard (which usually points to /dev/input/event0) either with evtest which shows the keys typed, or directly with my program and then decoding the scancodes.
Would anyone know how to disable the virtual terminals in linux? I am using Yocto, Morty version on an i.MX6 processor. Even though our base distribution is Yocto, unfortunately we have diverged from building it with recipes, so this is more of a straight linux question than Yocto…
To give some detail as to my problem: It is for an embedded device that has an HDMI port - when I attach a terminal to the HDMI port it shows the Linux Penguin logo, a getty service and blanks out after 600 seconds. I just want to use the hdmi port as an output with nothing displayed on the output and I want it to stay on all the time.
I have found that the hdmi port maps to /dev/tty1 – when I type: echo “asdfasdf” > /dev/tty1 I see the characters output to the monitor.
Here are a few things I have tried to no avail – a lot of these are not needed if I can figure out how to disable it as a virtual terminal…
• I figured out how to disable the getty service but a cursor still blinks. I don’t even want a cursor to show
• I have tried to disable the display of the penguins by disabling the LOGO in the kernel config parameters - I commented anything with LOGO out:
CONFIG_LOGO=y
CONFIG_LOGO_LINUX_MONO=y
CONFIG_LOGO_LINUX_VGA16=y
CONFIG_LOGO_LINUX_CLUT224=y
To no avail. The logo still shows : .
• The fact that it blanks after 600 seconds is console blanking – I can see it set to 600 in the file: /sys/module/kernel/parameters/consoleblank. When I issue the command: echo -e '\033[9;0]'>/dev/tty1
It sets the console blanking to 0 and wakes the terminal. Being able to wake the console up is limited success but I would like to disable the virtual terminal altogether…
• I tried commenting out any virtual terminal defines in the config file to no avail:
CONFIG_VT=y
CONFIG_VT_CONSOLE=y
CONFIG_VT_CONSOLE_SLEEP=y
CONFIG_HW_CONSOLE=y
CONFIG_VT_HW_CONSOLE_BINDING=y
Everything I have read suggests that /dev/tty1 is a virtual terminal or console. From what I read about the VT option, disabling the CONFIG_VT should do it:
VT — Virtual terminal Say yes here to get support for terminal devices
with display and keyboard devices. These are called "virtual" because
you can run several virtual terminals (also called virtual consoles)
on one physical terminal. You need at least one virtual terminal
device in order to make use of your keyboard and monitor. Therefore,
only people configuring an embedded system would want to say no here
in order to save some memory; the only way to log into such a system
is then via a serial or network connection. Virtual terminals are
useful because, for example, one virtual terminal can display system
messages and warnings, another one can be used for a text-mode user
session, and a third could run an X session, all in parallel.
Switching between virtual terminals is done with certain key
combinations, usually Alt-function key. If you are unsure, say yes, or
else you won't be able to do much with your Linux system.
But for some reason it doesn’t do anything!
• I found this thread; https://askubuntu.com/questions/357039/how-do-i-disable-virtual-consoles-tty1-6 among others, but none are much help since my distribution does not have any of the directories in the solutions offered in this thread or any others I have found. For instance I do not have a /etc/events.d nor do I have a /etc/default/console-setup file nor do I have a /etc/init directory… I imagine the reason for this is that my distribution uses systemd and the solutions are SysV based init maybe?
Disabling the logo or console blanking would not be necessary if I could just figure out how to disable that port as a terminal…
So does anyone have pointers or things I could try? I am relatively new (returning after 10 years - I worked with DNX 10 years ago v2.6 and it seems everything I knew about init is fairly obsolete lol) to linux so I am sure I am missing a lot…
Thanks,
- Chuck
I think I found the answer to my question. This is actually a frame buffer console documented here: Documentation/fb/fbcon.txt. From the documentation:
The framebuffer console (fbcon), as its name implies, is a text
console running on top of the framebuffer device. It has the
functionality of any standard text console driver, such as the VGA
console, with the added features that can be attributed to the
graphical nature of the framebuffer.
Commenting out the line
CONFIG_FRAMEBUFFER_CONSOLE=y
In the configuration file located in /arch/arm/configs will disable it.
Also this part of the documentation shows you how to disable it at runtime:
So, how do we unbind fbcon from the console? Part of the answer is in
Documentation/console/console.txt. To summarize:
Echo a value to the bind file that represents the framebuffer console
driver. So assuming vtcon1 represents fbcon, then:
echo 1 > sys/class/vtconsole/vtcon1/bind - attach framebuffer console
to
console layer echo 0 > sys/class/vtconsole/vtcon1/bind - detach framebuffer console from
console layer
When I issue the echo 0 command, the cursor stops blinking and starts blinking again when I issue the echo 1 command.
I think there is another way of doing it as well by modifying the Yocto build environment by putting the USE_VT="0" in the OpenEmbedded machine config file. The "USE_VT" variable is referenced by the sysvinit-inittab recipe. This answer was given to me from the Yocto Linux mailing list - but I have not tested it since we have diverged from Yocto...
My program begins like this:
#!/usr/bin/env python
import sys
from serial import Serial, EIGHTBITS, PARITY_NONE, STOPBITS_ONE
SERIAL_DEVICE = '/dev/ttyUSB0'
ser = Serial(SERIAL_DEVICE, timeout=2, baudrate=9600, bytesize=EIGHTBITS,
parity=PARITY_NONE, stopbits=STOPBITS_ONE)
The next part of the program sends something to the device and then expects a response. When I run it after reboot, it doesn't find the response it is expecting and terminates with an error (this is correct behavior apart from the fact that it doesn't see the response it expects).
However, if I run minicom and talk to the device through minicom, it works fine. If then I close minicom and run the program, it runs fine. The minicom configuration has an empty initialization string and I always exit without reset.
Needless to say, minicom has the same settings AFAICS. It also has hardware control on, but I did try rtscts=True as an argument to Serial() and saw no difference (and even if I had an error in the arguments, this doesn't explain why after executing minicom the program works properly).
The symptom you have is an indication that your program is not initializing the serial terminal to the proper mode that it requires.
minicom has the same settings AFAICS
Seems like you choose to guess rather than gather actual data.
Use stty -a -F /dev/ttyUSB0 before and after using minicom.
The major difference is that the termios mode is probably canonical by default (after the reboot), and minicom leaves it in non-canonical mode.
Try using stty raw -F /dev/ttyUSB0 before starting your program.
I have an UPS attached via USB port to my linux machine. Unfortunately the UPS is unsupported and doesn't show up as a reconized device. However it DOES show up correctly with the lsusb command.
I'd like to read the battery status from my UPS via a simple bash script (triggered by cron for example). I don't want a fully functional script as it would require to know the protocol of the specific UPS; I just want to create a script to write raw commands and read raw responses to/from the UPS given the known USB address, then it will be up to me to encode the actual command and parse the response.
Thank you.
You might be able to use the normal echo command to send strings directly to a device, like:
echo "some command" > /dev/usbXXX
To get the output you might be able to just read from it using e.g. cat:
cat /dev/usbXXX | grep "what you're looking for"
In Ubuntu, we can select the output device of audio in sound preferences. But now I want to write a shell script, so I need to select the output device from the commandline.
You can first view your current default audio device by typing:
pactl stat
And with
pactl list
you can view all your devices.
And with this command
echo "set-default-sink alsa_output.Headset" | pacmd
you can set the default device.
But I found a much better source for this problem and a included little shell script for this problem here http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-1370383.html