[chbot] Lightweight Linux,and serial

[Andy ZL3AG]

Something in http://technostuff.blogspot.co.nz/2008/10/some-useful-socat-commands.html might come in useful.


On 30/05/2017, at 4:45 PM, Mark Atherton 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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