Motherboard test & host software console NOTHING?

Hi,
I've recently (past 6 weeks) been struggling to upload the firmware onto my motherboard/extruder and finally succeeded by switching to sun java (over open java in ubuntu).
Now however when it comes to testing the motherboard/host communication, I see nothing in the reprap console, diddly squat!
The software doesn't hang, and if I load some g-code it goes through the motions i.e. displays an estimated time remaining (which continually increases).

Any ideas/experience of this problem?

Any help appreciated!

Turn on debug comm at a minimum.

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Bob Morrison
Wörth am Rhein, Germany
"Luke, use the source!"
BLOG - PHOTOS - Thingiverse

Commsdebug is set to true.
I've followed the wiki instructions but as usual (for me) nothing is working as it should!
Just wondering if there are further (obvious but undocumented) steps that I've missed or if there are other issues that need to be met (e.g. Java etc)

try this:

stty raw ignbrk 57600 < /dev/ttyUSB0 && ( cat <&3 & cat >&3; kill %%; ) 3<>/dev/ttyUSB0

changing baud rate and port as appropriate for your setup. This is a super-crude talker, which will allow you to communicate with the board.
To exit, press ctrl+d (eof). If you accidentally press ctrl+c or kill it some other way, you will have to killall cat or similar.

how does this work?
stty simply sets up the serial port options such as baud rate and character mangling.
&& runs the 2nd part if the 1st part succeeded
( .. ) starts a sub-shell with its own file descriptors
cat <&3 & starts a background job printing out characters read from file descriptor 3
cat >&3 starts a foreground job reading characters from your terminal and sending them to file descriptor 3. It will run until it receives EOF (ctrl+d) or is killed.
; waits for previous commnd to complete before running the next one, but does not care if it succeeded
kill %% kills the last background job started
3<>/dev/ttyUSB0 connects file descriptor 3 of the subshell to your reprap motherboard

The end effect is that characters received from your reprap are printed, while characters you type in are sent until you press ctrl+d.

Note that you can't use this for anything more than debugging without xon/xoff support in the firmware because it will overflow the motherboard chip's buffers rather quickly if unchecked.

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Wooden Mendel
Teacup Firmware

Well I won't pretend to even fake an understanding of what that means! I tried it nonetheless:

reprap@reprap-laptop:~$ stty raw ignbrk 19200 < /dev/ttyUSB0 && ( cat <&3 & cat >&3; kill %%; ) 3<>/dev/ttyUSB0
stty: standard input: unable to perform all requested operations
reprap@reprap-laptop:~$

Any suggestions?

what chip does your usb<->serial use? my ftdi one can do all sorts of things, and afaik the pl2303 ones have a decent feature set too.. maybe yours isn't /dev/ttyUSB0?

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Wooden Mendel
Teacup Firmware

It's this FTDI based cable [www.tronisoft.com]
also, /dev/ttyUSB0 is the correct com port.
What does it mean when it says unable to perform operations, is something missing?

KmE Wrote:
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> What does it mean when it says unable to perform
> operations, is something missing?

I have never seen stty spit that message before, but from its source code it seems to say that it says that if some changes succeeded and some failed... what version of coreutils, and what kernel are you using? I have coreutils-8.5, and kernel 2.6.35 although it's been working since I started with 2.6.21 or so...

you could always try applying the options one at a time and see which one it chokes on

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Wooden Mendel
Teacup Firmware