[chbot] Lightweight Linux,and serial

[Andrew Errington]

Don't you just need a terminal emulator in the first instance?  Type your
command and display incoming bytes.

Off the top of my head "screen" for command line use, or GTKterm for GUI
use, or something similar for Windows and do all of your testing on the
Windows machine.  Failing that, Raspbian on a Raspberry Pi, giving you a
complete, useful, and cheap Linux box.

Otherwise, I'd probably do it with Python and PySerial (it's
cross-platform).  Watch out in Python 3 that strings must be converted to
byte streams if you want them to behave as you expect.

You might also find some useful tools here:
https://blog.philippklaus.de/2011/08/sniff-serial-connection

Andrew

On May 30, 2017 4:44 PM, "Mark Atherton" <markaren1 at xtra.co.nz> wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> Just about to start poking serial commands at the Pan and Tilt head
> (following on from a posting here, maybe a month ago), and would like
> suggestions about a lightweight Linux distro to create the test patterns
> from.
>
> The P&T unit has an unknown control protocol, but am pretty sure that the
> signalling is RS232. There are at least three possible protocols, so need
> an easy way to generate test data, and to examine returned serial data.
>
> How well / simply implemented / fully buffered is serial data managed when
> the OS receives (binary) messages ?
>
> Basically plan to send out a test message, wait maybe 20ms, then see if
> any data has been received. If data is present, then dump it out as hex, if
> not, then move onto the next test message.
>
> Since this is close to being a real-time application, am concerned about
> of ease of checking for incoming messages, and of course, the possibility
> of incoming bytes getting dropped.
>
> Messages each way are likely to be short (less than 10 bytes), and at low
> speed (less than 57.6k baud).
>
> So, need a (preferably) lightweight Linux distro, which can be installed
> on a laptop reasonably quickly, preferably has GCC pre-installed, and is
> capable of being easily controlled from a win7 machine via a readily
> available (free) remote desktop.
>
> Thoughts, comments, and observation please.
>
> -Mark
>
>
>
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