Serial Ports

I like serial hardware. The ability to get lots of ports on one board, the relative simplicity of the protocol and electrical interface, and the wide range of devices that can talk RS232 appeal to me. DeepThought now has 48 serial ports. Two serial ports are on the motherboard. Two 16-port concentrators hang off of a Digiboard X/em PCI board. One 16-port Digiboard Portserver is in the garage, with 14 of its ports appearing on DeepThought through the “digiport” driver.
The serial devices currently connected to DeepThought are:

The Armory CoopCam, a serial camera from WinCam, currently running 57600b because it's at the end of 150 feet of cat3 cable - both it and the serial port it's connected to can do up to 460800b, but I'll have to go to RS422 to get anywhere near that.
Two US Robotics Sportster 28800b modems, for deepthought's dialup lines.
A Wyse 60 terminal. Irene uses it to log into DeepThought.
An Infrared Remote Controller, which lets me control my AV equipment.
A Rain8Net irrigation controller. This controls all 8 valves of the house irrigation system (four sprinklers, three for specialized watering, and one that does a daily top-off of the back yard fountain).
A rain gauge. Each time the rain gauge accumulates 1⁄100″ of rain, it momentarily opens a set of contacts. I've connected them to a serial port in such a way that carrier detect is asserted when the contacts open. When CD is asserted, the OS allows an open of the port to succeed. A simple daemon waits for the port to open and writes a timestamp into a file when it does:
```
#!/bin/ksh
trap "" HUP
SECONDS=$(/local/bin/gnu/date +%s)
while :</dev/ttyB11; do
    print $SECONDS >> /usr/adm/rain
    sleep 2
done
```
A utility reads the datafile and generates a report based on it.
A Microchip PICSTART Plus programmer.
An APC SmartUPS 2000.
Five Seiko SII label printers (“eBay specials&rdquo), each loaded with a different type of label. Yes, I'm an organizational fanatic.
An Epson TM-T80 thermal receipt printer. One of my favorite devices! It only does text, but is very fast and is not constrained to a "sheet of paper" model; the slip that pops out is just long enough for whatever is printed. It's great for printing notes, shopping lists, driving directions, recipes, etc. I use it all the time, far more than my other printers.
A NetCallerID device. This is a Caller ID interface device; it plugs into a phone line and into a serial port. When a call is received, it writes a message containing the caller ID information to the serial port. The device is no longer manufactured, but they can be found on eBay or elsewhere. I wrote this utility to monitor it. When caller ID information is received, the utility logs it, and also pops up an X message and sends an email message telling who is calling.

Occasionally connected devices:

A Protek 506 multimeter, which has a serial port that lets it be used for logging.
A BP Microsystems EPROM/microcontroller programmer.
The IR receiver that I used to decode IR remotes so that I can emulate them with the controller.
The Interface Unit E which I attach to my Canon EOS 620/630/RT cameras' Technical Back Es. The TBE records every imaginable parameter of each exposure (except the focus distance, which unfortunately isn't available in EOS cameras). The information can be downloaded through the IUE.
An Agfa digital camera, for downloading images.

Other serial hardware I plan to acquire:

A serial-controlled X10 base station, so that we can control lamps, appliances, etc. throughout the house.
A serial controlled outlet strip, which gives individual simple on/off control of each outlet at a much lower cost/outlet than X10 modules do.
More weather instruments.
The serial display device that I plan on converting my LED matrix into.
Lots of other things!

Elsewhere in the house we have Wyse 60 terminals on the Digi Portserver and a Livingston Portmaster 2e. We at one time had about a dozen spread through the house, but with the advent of the graphically-oriented web, they aren't quite as useful as they used to be! Aside from the one mentioned above, all we have left are two in the upper living room, one in the garage, and one in the downstairs bathroom (just because).

Formerly connected devices throughout the house:

On DeepThought:

Ten modems on a rack of 12 Telebit 3000s. This rack of modems was the most generous contribution DeepThought had gotten. Until it was given to me, many of DeepThought's modems were 2400b and 9600b. The Telebit 3000s did 14400b+compression (v32bis/v42bis). When I got down to two modems (as more and more users switched to logging in over the net), I replaced it with a couple of standalone modems to free up the rack space.
Three ZyXEL U-1496 modems. These did v32bis/v42bis, in addition to ZyXEL's proprietary 19200 modulation. They also did voice IO. One of them was on my voice line, so I would play with vgetty every once in a while.
The modem rack control port. This let me query the status of and reset the rack-mounted modems.
The modem rack monitor port. This allowed for monitoring/analysis of problematic connections.
A Mouse Systems graphics tablet. This was a nice device, and was Summagraphics compatible so it worked with SCO's event driver. Unfortunately, back when it was working I never found a utility that used the absolute position information it generates.
The console mouse (which now uses the keyboard mouse port).
A secondary console keyboard. DeepThought used to have two video boards and three monitors. One of the video boards was a mono board, and was connected to two monitors. One of the mono monitors was at my desk next to the color monitor; the other was at my workbench. Also at the workbench was a Keytronic 1200b serial keyboard. I used SCO's mscreen program to convert the secondary keyboard and monitor into a secondary console (something mscreen was never intended for!). I wrote an mscreencap entry that understood the escape sequences produced by the Keytronic keyboard and the escape sequences necessary to cause the SCO console driver to switch multiscreens between those I'd assigned to the mono display with vidi. I started up mscreen like this:
TERM=ansi-k /local/bin/setpgrp $keyboard-tty sh -c \ "(stty 1200 sane -ocrnl -ixon -ixoff; mscreen -n 7) < $keyboard-tty > /dev/mono"
This caused its input to come from the serial keyboard and its output to go to whichever multiscreen was currently displayed on the mono monitor.
Two Wyse 60 terminals. One was my workbench terminal, replacing the secondary console device described above. I have since moved the console display itself to the workbench. The second sat next to my console, and was used as the console for the kernel debugger, since the real console was usually in a graphics mode that the debugger can't deal with. The system is far more stable now; I haven't needed its kernel debugger for years.
A homemade UPS monitor. I added a monitor port to the system's previous UPS, which I salvaged/fixed by adding circuitry to its Power Good and Battery Low LED indicators to make them deassert carrier detect and send a break respectively.

On the onetime upper living room server, eddie:

A Diablo 630 daisy-wheel printer. For many years this was the house's main printer, producing much nicer output than any of the dot-matrix printers of the time. It was noisy enough that it lived in a printer enclosure.

On the onetime garage server, earth:

Five modems used for SLIP and PPP by the sites that shared the cost of our IP link with us for the first decade or so.
The control port of the Ascend P50 ISDN/Ethernet router that initially connected us to the Internet.

This web page maintained by John DuBois