All,
This is a rather long post. I hope you can bear with me to the end and offer
some suggestions. This is about my struggles with getting the serial port on the
TS-7250 to communicate with a Handspring Visor. I will say right from the
beginning that I don't believe my problems are caused by the TS-7250
but, ... I'm not sure either. Well, you'll see what I mean.
The Setup
I am building a digital jukebox using the Giantdisc program. Details found
here http://www.giantdisc.org. I have the program running on my desktop PC
(Linux OS) and can use the Visor to control the application via the serial
port. The connection between the PC and the serial port is made via a
USB->serial converter cable that connects to the USB hot-sync port on the
Visor. Although this is one of the crappier Palm devices (mostly because the
Palm OS cannot be updated) it does work sufficiently for me at this time.
Giantdisc also supports communicating via TCP but my Visor doesn't support
this so it is not an option for me.
Now, Giantdisc allows you to separate the server (running the database) and
the client so that you can have the database on one box and the client
connected to the Palm on a different computer. A small Perl application runs
on the client that handles communication between the application on the Visor
and the database on the server. At this point you can probably guess where
I'm going with this. I want to use the TS-7250 as the client connected to my
stereo and run the database on my desktop PC. The reason is because I don't
want a relatively large PC box in my living room with all of its noisy fans.
I thought the TS-7250 would be ideal as the client in my living room; small,
quiet, low power device. Here's a simple ASCII diagram of what I am trying to
accomplish. (If this looks weird in your email client try viewing as plain
text.)
+-------------+ +---------------+ +------------+
| Handspring | serial | | Ethernet | Desktop |
| |---------| TS-7250 |----------| |
| Visor | | | | PC |
+-------------+ +---------------+ +------------+
Currently, all of this is in one place but eventually the TS-7250 and Visor
will be in the living room and the TS-7250 will communicate with the PC
wirelessly. But, I haven't gotten that far, yet.
The Problem
Simply put, I cannot get the Visor to communicate with the TS-7250 via the
serial port. I have to use ttyAM0 because the ttyAM1 port does not have flow
control (please correct me if I am wrong about this). I have disabled console
output (removed JP2) and changed the startup script to use ttyAM1 as the
console. When I connect the Visor to the TS-7250 it simply does not
communicate. The first message the Visor application sends is a "ping" command
and this is never received by the TS-7250. Keep in mind that the same setup,
same Giantdisc version are used on the TS-7250 and my desktop PC.
Now, I decide to take the Visor out of the equation and connect a null modem
cable from a serial port on the PC to ttyAM0 on the TS-7250. At the command
line on the PC I type:
$ echo "ping" >/dev/ttyS1
and Viola! the Perl script for Giantdisc running on the TS-7250 receives the
command. At this point, I would think the problem lies with the Visor except
I can plug the Visor into the PC and it works perfectly. So what is going on?
What is the difference between the serial ports on a PC and the serial ports
on the TS-7250? Can anyone help me get this to work?
Additional Info
I have already purchased the sound card that I plan on using with the TS-7250
and it has two serial ports on it. Unfortunately, I can't get either of these
serial ports to work. Not even with the null modem cable. They are detected by
the kernel when it boots. Here is partial dmesg output:
Serial driver version 5.05c (2001-07-08) with no serial options enabled
ttyS02 at 0x89c003e8 (irq = 40) is a 16550A
ttyS03 at 0x89c002e8 (irq = 33) is a 16550A
I have tried switching the interrupts, which I read may be wrong in another
post, so that ttyS02 is on 33 and ttyS03 is on 40. No luck.
So I'm stuck. Short of spending more money to buy a Palm device that would
work in TCP mode (no guarantees this would work with the TS-7250) I don't know
what to do. If anyone can offer insight into what is different about the
serial ports on the TS-7250 and a standard PC, I would appreciate it very
much.
Thanks,
Mike
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