Re: [TCLUG:9791] Palm Pilot and Seral Port

[schewe@tcfreenet.org]

On  4 Nov, Mike Hicks wrote:
> I just got myself a Palm IIIx (yay!), but I can't get it to communicate
> through my serial ports at all (at least I can't see any data coming
> over the line)..  Grr!
> 
> Does anyone have a good knowledge of PC serial ports (heh, that's
> probably a stupid question).  Any ideas as to what settings the port
> should have before I try to sync through it?
> 
> I've tried just hooking up a mouse, doing 'cat /dev/ttyS[01]', but no
> data comes over the line, at least none that I can see.  The serial
> ports are enabled in the BIOS and show up on boot, so hopefully they are
> actually alive (and not fried or anything..)
> 
I've just got my serial ports setup with the default settings.  In the
BIOS I made sure to turn bother ports on, sometimes they're called
UARTs rather than serial ports.  Set 1 to 3F8 and IRQ 4, set 2 to 2E8
and IRQ 3.  Then you should just be able to boot up and use
/dev/ttyS[0,1].  In the boot sequence you should see something from the
BIOS that tells which serial ports were found, make sure both are
found.  Also when Linux starts booting it will list what the serial
ports are and what it finds.  Check for  that as well.

As far as talking with the palm, start out with a real slow bps and
work up from there.  I've run as fast as 19.2Kbps, but that depends on
what power cables I'm running by.

-- 
Jon Schewe 
http://eggplant.mtu.net/~jpschewe
schewe@tcfreenet.org