[Coco] DW4/Prolific USB/Xubuntu 13.10 Fail [Solved]

[Luis Antoniosi (CoCoDemus)]

Its easy, just open instance manager, stop the current DW instance and
then the wizard will show your serial port as available.


On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 10:27 AM, Aaron Wolfe <aawolfe at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 8, 2014 at 6:23 PM, Joel Ewy <jcewy at swbell.net> wrote:
>> Well, I ordered a couple of the super cheap USB/Serial adapters that Aaron
>> says work for him, and got good results with DW4.  If the problem with the
>> Prolific chip is a proliferation of bad clones, then perhaps Aaron's source
>> has gotten ahold of the real deal.  I couldn't find where Aaron posted the
>> link when I looked for it just now, so I'll re-post for any who want to try
>> these out:
>> http://www.ebay.com/itm/USB-to-RS232-serial-DB9-Adapter-4-XP-Vista-Win7-Female-Screw-FastShipping-USA-/230911838342?pt=US_Parallel_Serial_PS_2_Cables_Adapters&hash=item35c36b0886
>>
>> I haven't tested them thoroughly yet, or really checked out the performance,
>> but the one I opened does seem to work, which is a lot more than I can say
>> for the one I had lying around before.
>>
>> One little hitch I ran into was that when I tried running the configuration
>> wizard it wouldn't detect the serial port, and it wouldn't accept the
>> /dev/ttyUSB0 (or just ttyUSB0) port if I typed it in manually.  I finally
>> decided just to try it anyway, and it worked.  I guess that what was
>> happening is that the server was already grabbing the port, which was listed
>> in config.xml, so it wasn't available to be discovered or (re-)used by the
>> wizard.  Is that a fair guess?
>
> Yes.  DW4 (well, really the RXTX library that DW uses) has a hard time
> detecting ports on Linux.  Unlike windows and osx, linux doesn't have
> a nifty "hey operating system, what serial ports do you have?"
> mechanism.  Instead you have to look around in /dev for likely
> suspects, and RXTX does a less than awesome job figuring things out.
> It also sometimes struggles to admit ports we are already using do
> actually exist.  I think I added some code to try and work around that
> at some point, but maybe it isn't effective.
>
> If you're running the wizard for the very first time, it usually works
> OK since DW out of the box doesn't try to touch any serial ports.
> However, if DW is already using a port, it might not like to 'detect'
> it again, especially on Linux.
> This definitely is an item on the long list of things I wish were better.
>
>>
>> In any case, these particular cheap, no-name USB/Serial adapters from China
>> seem to work reasonably well for DriveWire.  At least they're worth the
>> pittance you pay for them as a quick and dirty way to add a serial port to a
>> computer with only USB.  Now I need to try it out on the Raspberry Pi.
>>
>> JCE
>>
>> On 12/25/2013 11:22 PM, Aaron Wolfe wrote:
>>>
>>> ...
>>>
>>> Finally, while my experience with prolific adapters has been great, there
>>> are plenty of folks who think they are junk.  Maybe some of them are?  If
>>> you can connect a to another PC it would be worth confirming you can pass
>>> data at 115k or whatever rate you use on the FPGA board.  If it works in
>>> minicom or any terminal program, it will very likely work fine with DW.
>>>
>>> Good luck..
>>>
>>> On Dec 25, 2013 10:42 PM, "Joel Ewy" <jcewy at swbell.net> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I'm trying to get DW4.3.30 working in a somewhat new environment with
>>>
>>> poor luck...
>>> I have one of these USB/Serial thingies.  It's a Prolific -- cheap and
>>> sucky, but Aaron says they work for him, right?...
>>
>>
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>
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