FMS Forum

by **englotk** » Wed Mar 12, 2003 3:41 am

I built the serial interface years ago when I was running windows 98. It worked flawlessly. Now I have XP and decided to fly for awhile but to my disapointment...no go.

I looked through the topics and it looks like this interface no longer works with windows XP. Is this correct?

What has changed? Can't we use the serial dll's from 98 in XP. Serial communication has been around forever why doesn't this work in XP. THanks

by **Steve Lewin** » Wed Mar 12, 2003 12:46 pm

It's not really anything to do with dlls. Win XP uses the NT-based HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) which prevents programs directly poking about with port pins and interrupts. Unfortunately that's exactly what the old parallel and serial interfaces do.

Steve

by **englotk** » Wed Mar 12, 2003 9:45 pm

I see, good to know. I H8 microsoft. Well time to build the PIC interface I guess. Thanks

by **KreAture** » Thu May 29, 2003 11:25 pm

I don't see what the whole fuzz is about.
Take a look at "IC-Prog" at It uses a driver for direct access to both com and lpt. It's a small 6k sys-file and it installs it on command from the user.
Similar driver is used by other microchip programmers.

One is called port95nt I believe and is shareware.
You also have one called TinyPort.

The most popular, and best I believe, is GiveIO.

Why not look into one or more of theese and add support for com/lpt direct access to w2k/nt/xp users :-)

by **Steve Lewin** » Fri May 30, 2003 8:12 am

Because none of them that I've ever seen allow direct access to the individual port pins AND control of the port interrupts which is what is required.

OTOH if you're not just guessing but have actually tested one that works with an FMS serial interface please let us know which it is.

Steve

by **KreAture** » Sat May 31, 2003 5:01 am

GiveIO should do this as it is how you need to access the port if you want to program a microcontroller. You need access to separate port pins and you need to be able to over-ride or disable interupts. I have not personally verified this but there is no other way the programmers and software could work on my computer if this driver didn't support this.

I truly believe it would be worth a closer look.
If you want, I can confirm this before you start wasting time on it.

by **Steve Lewin** » Sat May 31, 2003 8:49 am

I've only used a few different microcontroller programmers but the ones I've seen all use a limited serial protocol and only standard serial interrupts. None of the "drivers" that I've seen support RI, the pin FMS uses.

Personally I'm quite happy making PIC serial interfaces which have none of these problems but I'm sure there will be some people interested in being able to use their old i/f on Win2K/XP if you wanted to do the experimenting. Presumably the parallel i/f would be most interesting as it's the simplest i/f to make. One problem might be that they all rely on being able to pull power from the port to drive the i/f circuit.

Steve

by **KreAture** » Sat May 31, 2003 2:53 pm

You are right in that the PIC IF is the best in many ways, but I do not like it's accuracy. (This could ofcource be tweaked a bit to use the full range of the bytes.)

Another good thing about the PIC interface is the low load it presents on the computer. Receiving serial data is a lot easier than analyzing the singal directly.

How about adding support for 16-bit data?
(I have an old futaba here wich have it's pots in a R/C-coupling and so does not have any real resolution-limits.)

by **BiZ** » Tue Jun 24, 2003 1:39 pm

Hi guys,
Did you ever tried direct-io? It seems that it handles the interrupts... I will try this soon, i'll tell you if it works.
You can find it on: www.direct-io.com

FMS Forum

Serial dll in winXP - Serial dll in winXP

Who is online