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 34 serial ports. Two 16-port concentrators hang off of a Digiboard X/em PCI board. The other two serial ports are on the motherboard.
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.
Three Wyse 60 terminals. Irene uses one of these to log into DeepThought. One is my workbench terminal, replacing the secondary console device described below. The third sits next to my console, and is used as the console for the kernel debugger, since the real console is usually in a graphics mode that the debugger can't deal with.
An Infrared Remote Controller, which lets me control my AV equipment.
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, 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.

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.

Formerly connected devices:

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, I never found any type of 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.
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.

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.
Serial controlled relay sets, for such purposes as controlling irrigation valves.
Lots of other things!

Elsewhere in the house we have lots of other serial hardware. eddie, the upper living room terminal server, has two (old!) AST 4-port boards. They are used for:

A Diablo 630 daisy-wheel printer. Yes, really. Since all of the other printers we have in the house are dot-matrix, this one produces by far the best copy. Although it's slow, it does produce extremely high-quality output. It's very noisy, so it lives in a printer enclosure.
Three Wyse 60 terminals in the upper living room.

earth, our news/SLIP/PPP/terminal/DNS server, also has two AST 4-port boards, along with a single-port board. They are connected to:

Three modems used for SLIP and PPP by the sites that share the cost of our IP link with us.
The control port of the Ascend P50 ISDN/Ethernet router that connects us to the Internet.
Three Wyse 60 terminals in the lower living room.
A Wyse 60 terminal in the downstairs bathroom (just because).

The other ports on earth used to be connected to a terminal and modems (we used to have more IP leaf sites than we do now). They'll undoubtedly be used again in the future, either for modems or for other devices throughout the house. earth is in the garage, where the house wiring terminates, so any serial devices in the house that aren't near a server will be connected to it. For example, we'll probably put an IR controller in the lower living room to control the AV equipment there. The weather station, LED matrix, etc. would also likely be connected to earth; its 1-port board can be replaced with an 8-port board if necessary.

This web page maintained by John DuBois