On Thursday 28 December 2006 11:14, Bob Chiodini wrote: >Gene, > >I tried a pl2303 serial to USB one and had problems. It was a radio >shack branded device. Exactly the same unit here. >Using FC4 at the time it looked like only every other character was >being received by the host. Data to the device was fine. Unfortunately, >I never resolved the problem and opted for a four port Keyspan device. >No problems connecting through it to the same serial device. I wonder if possibly the pl2303 driver might have been at fault in the older FC4 kernels. I know its had a couple of patches since then. See below. >If the Garmin only has four wires, most likely the handshake is >XON/XOFF, if any. Does the Garmin "talk" correctly via one of the "real" >serial ports? Apparently so *once* I'd found the option in the Garmins menu's to change it from its default protocol to the NMEA protocol. That was genuinely hidden better by far than any Easter Eggs you ever snooped thru a game for. At that point I started to see data, but one way only, on a shack rs-232 sniffer with all its leds. But _only_ on its RD led, and I assume if I turned the sniffer around (it running on db9-db25 adaptors on both ends of it) it would switch to the TD led. Data in a pattern of off for a couple of seconds, blinking for a couple of seconds, then on for a couple of seconds, blink till it went back off, repeat forever. So I don't think we are talking to it, just listening. Which, in the context of your quote about every other character getting to the host, does not now seem to be the case. ANAICT they are all getting there. Laying there on a chair seat beside my desk, in a house covered with alu sideing, it did finally manage to get a location valid enough to display it in roadnav. This was about in the middle of my downloading the TIGERline maps for WV, that I noticed that yellow box & arrow came up. So, satisfied that it was working, I plugged my x10 stuffs back into ttyS1 so I had all my outside lighting automation working tonight, changed the prefs in roadnav to use ttyUSB0, and plugged it back into the pl2303, and its still working! Based on that it looks like its a go to put this thing on my lappy and see if I can get a ticket for driving distracted or something, but what I see roadnav as needing next, is the text to speech util, so it can say "turn left at the next intersection" just like the indash stuff can do. If the trip is setup ahead of time, this shouldn't be *that* hard to do, by whatever means to set it up ahead of time, possibly even by entering the stuff from a mapquest query that one would normally print, and then get distracted reading it while flyng down county road xyz. Or I-90 for that matter, the point is its a needless visual distraction that could kill... But, its going to need some fuzzy logic/rubber in its calcs too, the green bar its drawing as it tracks the gps's reported location is off, or the TIGERline maps are off, its showing around 300 feet west of actual, about 30 feet wide and wandering back and forth about 700 feet in an northwest to southeast track. This gps, a Garmin 12, was made long before the noise was turned off that caused the civilian units to be in-accurate enough an artillery shell would miss its target harmlessly. This did not change noticeably when I moved it to a windowsill, but its a northern facing window. The signal bars are a lot higher though. That's a good excuse to go get a newer unit I suppose, but for marking a location and then taking me back to the same spot, it works quite well, I've found the boat dock in the dark several times with it to an accuracy or 30 feet or so. To paraphrase a saying that an ex brother-in-law was famous for, "its good enough for the girls I go with" ;) One thing that roadnav is doing when its set to track the gps, is its turning the map so the direction it thinks its going is up, and that's distracting while sitting here expecting north to be up. The map suddenly looks odd, and north isn't anywhere near up. In other words, it appears to be working, HOORAY! Thanks for the incentive to crawl under and try it on a regular serial port. I had about given up & needed a prod in the right direction. Old farts tend to sit there motionless for hours :) >Bob... -- Cheers Bob, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above message by Gene Heskett are: Copyright 2006 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.
