[In 11.5.1] RS232 Port handling

Features you would like in SCS
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MartinMFX
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[In 11.5.1] RS232 Port handling

Post by MartinMFX » Sat Jun 25, 2016 2:59 am

I mentioned this in the General topic a while ago but would like to put it forward as an official request as my usage of SCS is SEVERELY restricted by the lack of these :-

1) SCS needs to support any number of COM port numbers (currently it only supports upto Port 32)

2) It needs to be able to use the same COM port as both a Cue send device and a Cue control device at the same time. Currently a port can only be used as either one or the other.

Martin.

Mike Daniell
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Re: RS232 Port handling

Post by Mike Daniell » Sat Jun 25, 2016 9:30 am

MartinMFX wrote:1) SCS needs to support any number of COM port numbers (currently it only supports upto Port 32)
I have to put a practical limit on the highest port number simply because when SCS starts it cycles through these port numbers to see which ports are available. It used to be a maximum of 4 but I increased this to 32. I did try increasing the limit to 256 but found the processing (checking which ports are actually available) could take a while. What COM port numbers are you wanting to use?
MartinMFX wrote:1)2) It needs to be able to use the same COM port as both a Cue send device and a Cue control device at the same time. Currently a port can only be used as either one or the other.
I'll look into this for 11.5.1. It's probably just a limitation that was imposed by some underlying software I was using in the early days of SCS development, but the current software I'm using doesn't appear to have any such limitation.
Mike Daniell
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MartinMFX
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Re: RS232 Port handling

Post by MartinMFX » Sun Jun 26, 2016 3:08 am

MartinMFX wrote:1) SCS needs to support any number of COM port numbers (currently it only supports upto Port 32)
Mike Daniell wrote:I have to put a practical limit on the highest port number simply because when SCS starts it cycles through these port numbers to see which ports are available. It used to be a maximum of 4 but I increased this to 32. I did try increasing the limit to 256 but found the processing (checking which ports are actually available) could take a while. What COM port numbers are you wanting to use?
The problem is with WIndows and USB COM ports it can simply keep increasing the COM port number whenever a new (or even a previous one sometimes) USB serial lead is plugged in it can be a bit of a lottery as to which port numbers you end up with.

256 shouldn't take long there are various methods to find available ones some quicker and some better than others:-

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1388 ... s-in-win32

To be honest this is less of a show stopper than the other issue and there are ways to delete old unused ports and get the COM ports back down to lower numbers if they've crept up over 32 but it's not a particularly trivial thing to do. Here'e an example of the issue and the work around :-

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/wind ... 1d9?auth=1

Martin.

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Re: RS232 Port handling

Post by Mike Daniell » Sun Jun 26, 2016 12:08 pm

Thanks for the info, Martin. SCS uses the 'CreateFile' method of checking for COM ports. I've just run a test here increasing the number of ports checked to 256 and on my Windows 10 development machine this process took only about 140ms, so I'll implement this increase in 11.5.0. Allowing for both input and output on the same port will need more work so I'll schedule that for 11.5.1.
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MartinMFX
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Re: RS232 Port handling

Post by MartinMFX » Sun Jun 26, 2016 10:09 pm

Many thanks, I have only been using SCS as a freelancer at another company but I will now be buying my own copy of Platinum in anticipation :-) I'd better do it quick before the £ crashes even more :-(

Martin.

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Re: RS232 Port handling

Post by Mike Daniell » Fri Jul 15, 2016 9:26 pm

SCS 11.5.1 now supports both send and receive on the same serial (RS232) port, and also allows for port numbers up to 256.
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