[Coco] DriveWire 4 and Linux serial port

Allen Huffman alsplace at pobox.com
Sun Feb 8 07:31:28 EST 2015


> Maybe a misunderstanding here. The DW4 GUI (for instance running on a
> Windows machine) can remotely configure a DW4 server that is running
> on your RPi using its own remote protocol. No need for VNC or X11 on
> the RPi. Just specify the IP address of the RPi in the DW4 GUI.

Ah, good to know. But that's another can of worms. You ever try to configure a Pi to use a WiFi dongle without a mouse? It can be done but it's more work than I'd want a newbie to do :) I've done a few projects using them (including one which will have about 12 of the things talking to each other, redundantly sharing data)... I can do it, but could Joe User?

Plus, I don't want to require installing extra software to configure software on another machine just to run.

Here's the easy solution... Unzip on the Pi, edit "config.xml" and change in two places:

                <DeviceType category="device" list="serial,tcp-server,tcp-client,dummy" type="list">serial</DeviceType>
...
                <SerialDevice category="device" type="serialdev">/dev/ttyUSB0</SerialDevice>

I had not noticed "serial" was an option for the first one. Now, unzipping the .zip, and editing those two entries, then running it allows the CoCo to talk to it.

The steps would be:

CoCo:

merge a few modules together in to a loadable thing (easier than making a boot disk and a quick way to try it out)

Pi:

Download the .zip and get it to the Pi and unzip it.
Edit config.xml to specify the serial port.
(Possibly install Java? I can't remember if I already did that a month or so back.)
Run.

Then the rest should be doable from the "dw" command, yes?

What about doing the update? Can that be done via "dw"?

With these steps, getting it going becomes just a few minutes rathe than the hour I spent to figure this out. I'll get the CoCopedia entry updated once I reset my Pi to a stock image and recreate everything again.

		-- A





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