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Hello all,

Has anybody ever had success to use the combination Alix 3D2 and WS 2300 without an USB->serial cable ??

I tried to connect an old WS2300 (bought from ELV a view years ago...) directly by its serial interface to an Alix 3d2 board with no success. Using an Seria->USB converter and plug this to the USB interface of the board works, but I do not like this extra hardware…

So I tried to find out, what the reason for this is.
In an private mail Boris assumed, that the Alix BIOS makes usage of the serial interface and so it is blocked for the rest of the system. So I used a serial connection with some terminal software to change the bios setting to not use the console (it is the “R”-Key…).

But without success…

(And, to be honest, why should the BIOS setting influence the Linux usage of tty0?)

After looking a bit deeper, it became clear, that the operating system also makes usage of tty0 for the console:

After changing it by adding “console=tty1” to /boot/grub/menu.lst and a reboot, “dmesg|grep tty” shows this:

Kernel command line: root=/dev/hda1 ro quiet console=tty1
console [tty1] enabled

So, it seems, that tty1 was used. But – and this is the actual situation – the serial interface is still not working together directly with the WS2300.
So, has anybody of you an idea? I asked Boris and he seems also to be helpless.

CS

Josef

I am quite sure that degraded RS232 support that can only handle RX/TX lines of AMD geode chipset used in ALIX.3D3 and .3D2 are giving you the headaches with WS2300. WS2300 needs the DTR/RTS status lines correctly set and this is not supported by your system's hardware.

Sorry, there is nothing I can do on this. Please go with a RS232-USB converter.

Boris,

thank you for your quick reply even the answer is not what I wanted to hear ;-)

So may be it is a good idea to add this fact to the doc to prevent others to fall into the same trap.

BTW: I had an USB->Ser converter with an PL2303 chip in my spare part box but had a look at eBay: you can get one for ~6 EUR. But be carefull: not all USB->RS232 converters work with the WS2300, so search for "Prolific" or PL2303.

CS

Josef