[GTALUG] Actual ttyS0 MIA

[Alvin Starr]

On 5/9/20 7:25 PM, Stewart C. Russell via talk wrote:
> On 2020-05-07 4:09 p.m., Alvin Starr via talk wrote:
>>
>> The headers and cables tended to be pretty standard.
>
> Thanks, Alvin. TIL I learned that they're actually not. Well, there's 
> one standard, and there's the thing that ASUS uses. Guess who bought a 
> "standard" cable but has an ASUS motherboard?
>
> The "standard" way assumes an IDC 10-way header on the motherboard and 
> an IDC 9-pin RS-232 connector on the other end. Because of the 
> difference in pin ordering, a straight-through ribbon cable ends up 
> mapping header pins 1-9 to 1, 6, 2, 7, 3, 8, 4, 9.
>
>     1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
>
>     1   2   3   4   5
>       6   7   8   9
>
Someone once said.
"The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to chose from"

I have had good luck with Asus boards over the years but its been a long 
time since I plugged in a serial port.

That sucks that the pin layout no longer supports headers and ribbon cables.

> You can see the pinout for this on a weird little embedded 386SX clone 
> I have (ZF MicroSystems OEMmodule): 
> https://archive.org/details/zf_systemcard_technical/page/10/mode/2up
>
> ASUS, bless 'em, decided that they should be different and mapping 
> header pins 1-9 to RS-232 connector pins 1-9. More logical, maybe, but 
> it means you can never use IDC 9-pin connectors with an ASUS board.
>
> I've rewired it and all is well.
>
>> There are a number of programs for managing serial ports but I have 
>> had reasonably good luck with minicom. 
>
> minicom's usually my go-to program too. One of my devices insists on 
> talking 7M1, and minicom can't set that as a default. I had to compile 
> the venerable C-Kermit for out-the-box mark parity support. C-Kermit 
> doesn't come as an Ubuntu package, and building it is a bit special. 
> CUNY stopped supporting it (and Frank) in 2011, so development has 
> slowed way down. A shame, 'cos you can bootstrap Kermit using almost 
> anything and end up with a robust 8-bit file transfer path.
>
I know people still using UUCP.
So not all serial communications are dead.

> cheers,
>  Stewart
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Alvin Starr                   ||   land:  (647)478-6285
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