Tech Support Forum - View Single Post - USB Serial convetor

dave66 · 11-21-2008, 08:23 AM

Hi All,

I'm new to TSF and also Linux, so I'm hoping some of the gurus here can help me.

As I say I'm new to Linux but working to get to grip with things. We have a new project started whereby we are porting our existing code from an Embedded system to a netbook environment, Acer Aspire One which is running Linpus Lite (Commercial Fedora). Anyhow the Aspire One does not come with serial ports and we have to have at least one serial port for our application to capture data from a weigh scale.

So I've got a USB to Serial convertor cable from Aten, it's using the PL2303 chipset. I have now successfully installed the cable and when I run dmesg I can see the device is connected and drivers are loaded "pl2303 converter now attached to ttyUSB0".

I have few issues:

1. I need a way to test that it is indeed working, so I was wondering if there is an application I can run on Linux (similar to Hyperterminal) so that I can capture the data from the scales or other serial device.

2. Within Linux, is there a method to configure the COM port. I have created a symbolic link (ln -s /dev/ttyUSB0 com1) but I've now idea how to configure the port to 9600,n,8,1.

3. I have a utility written for Windows which we use to upload data from our Embedded system and while I can get the application to execute using Wine, the serial comms is not working. Initially the application could not "see" the com port, however I found that if I created a symbolic link "ln -s /dev/ttyUSB0 ~/.wine/dosdevices/com1" that the application now sees the port and I believe tries to communicate using it. But I don't know if the communication is failing because the port is not actually working or because it's not configured correctly.

Any suggestions/guidance would be most welcome.

Thanks

David

11-21-2008, 08:23 AM	#1 (permalink)
dave66 Registered User Join Date: Nov 2008 Posts: 2 OS: Linux (Linpus)	USB Serial convetor - Linpus (Fedora) Hi All, I'm new to TSF and also Linux, so I'm hoping some of the gurus here can help me. As I say I'm new to Linux but working to get to grip with things. We have a new project started whereby we are porting our existing code from an Embedded system to a netbook environment, Acer Aspire One which is running Linpus Lite (Commercial Fedora). Anyhow the Aspire One does not come with serial ports and we have to have at least one serial port for our application to capture data from a weigh scale. So I've got a USB to Serial convertor cable from Aten, it's using the PL2303 chipset. I have now successfully installed the cable and when I run dmesg I can see the device is connected and drivers are loaded "pl2303 converter now attached to ttyUSB0". I have few issues: 1. I need a way to test that it is indeed working, so I was wondering if there is an application I can run on Linux (similar to Hyperterminal) so that I can capture the data from the scales or other serial device. 2. Within Linux, is there a method to configure the COM port. I have created a symbolic link (ln -s /dev/ttyUSB0 com1) but I've now idea how to configure the port to 9600,n,8,1. 3. I have a utility written for Windows which we use to upload data from our Embedded system and while I can get the application to execute using Wine, the serial comms is not working. Initially the application could not "see" the com port, however I found that if I created a symbolic link "ln -s /dev/ttyUSB0 ~/.wine/dosdevices/com1" that the application now sees the port and I believe tries to communicate using it. But I don't know if the communication is failing because the port is not actually working or because it's not configured correctly. Any suggestions/guidance would be most welcome. Thanks David