[forhire]

I have an old Centroid CNC4 controller. I am using gtkterm in Ubuntu for serial communications. I am currently sending huge files to the control line by line. After each line the terminal waits for a question mark (?) to be returned before sending the next line. In interactive mode it actually returns "Block?". Normally it works ok. At random the controller returns a pause, please press start key to continue. When this occurs there is always a blank "Block?" line as if the terminal missed the first returned question mark response. Press the start key and it continues until the next pause. This is annoying when running a large job.

I have looked at the file with vi and all the lines appear to end in carriage return (^M) which is correct. I don't see any issues. No blank lines or extra characters.

I tried removing the line numbers... no change. Serial settings are plain vanilla 9600/8N1.

Anyone familiar with sending largish files to this control using any terminal, like procomm or similar? Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

[forhire]

I verified the port settings on the cnc4 controller were indeed 9600 baud and captured this screen shot which shows the issue.

[forhire]

It appears that it must be some type of serial issue. As an experiment I changed the port rate from 9600 to 300 baud. I know it was crazy but I wanted to rule out the controller as the cause. It was very slow, but I was able to send a huge file without issue. Now I need to see why I cannot maintain proper communication at the higher rate. Any known issues with gtkterm?

[forhire]

Any known issues with gtkterm?

Might be of some interest. If using gtkterm you need to update to 0.99.6!

So tonight I setup a test to compare minicom and gtkterm to see if I could isolate the problem. I've used minicom in the past but the ascii-xfr module doesn't support the wait for special character feature that's required for drip feeding. That is why I want to use gtkterm.

For this test I'm simply listing a program from memory. Once comparing the minicom to gtkterm outputs it became very obvious that gtkterm had an issue. Tried hardware flow control, no change. I've attached the screen shots.

I compiled the latest gtkterm 0.99.6 from source. Appears to have solved the issue

Image 1: gtkterm 0.99.5-1
Image 2: minicom
Image 3: gtkterm 0.99.6

[forhire]

Ran a huge program last night. The update to 0.99.6 has solved the problem. Worked perfectly. Yeah

[mkd]

how do you update to gtkterm 0.099.6?
i'm totally new to linux

[forhire]

I downloaded and installed from the tar ball.
https://fedorahosted.org/gtkterm/

Here's the step by step process:
https://fedorahosted.org/gtkterm/ticket/2

I also got the compile error but the program is working fine in 10.04. Hope this helps.

[mkd]

thanks for the info.
i;ve got to the 'make install' command but keep getting

.
.
.
make[1]: Entering directory `/home/haas/Desktop/temp/src'
make[2]: Entering directory `/home/haas/Desktop/temp/src'
test -z "/usr/local/bin" || /bin/mkdir -p "/usr/local/bin"
/usr/bin/install -c gtkterm '/usr/local/bin'
make[2]: Nothing to be done for `install-data-am'.
make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/haas/Desktop/temp/src'
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/haas/Desktop/temp/src'
Making install in po
make[1]: Entering directory `/home/haas/Desktop/temp/po'
/bin/sh @MKINSTALLDIRS@ /usr/local/share
/bin/sh: Can't open @MKINSTALLDIRS@
make[1]: *** [install-data-yes] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/haas/Desktop/temp/po'
make: *** [install-recursive] Error 1


i'll start over, following the directions posted "to the letter" this time.
i know i didn't use the 'tar xvzf gtkterm-0.99.6.tar.gz' command to decompress.

using ubuntu 10.04

[wendtmk]

mkd,

Either you don't have the permissions required to write in the /usr/local/share directory, or you don't have the permissions to create the /usr/local/share directory if it doesn't exist.

You could try your "make install" command this way - "sudo make install" which will prompt you for your password, and sudo will run the make install with higher privileges than your typical low privilege user account.

Mark

On edit, you could also su to the root account and install the software, without the sudo utility.

[mkd]

this forum is great!
i did end up using the sudo make install command. it ran with a couple errors posting, so thought it was not working.
windows trick: restart computer and the software updates to 99.6!

cant wait to DNC!
thanks!

[wendtmk]

Glad it worked out for you. The README and INSTALL files usually mention to use the sudo command on the "make install" command, but not always, and for folks that aren't used to compiling and installing from source code, that can bring the build to a halt.

You mention "it ran with a couple errors posting". Were they actually errors, or just warnings? Typically, a compile will complete with warnings popping up, but will bomb if there's an actual error. Warnings are usually not a big deal, since source code written and compiled on one OS architecture may compile cleanly, but on a different OS architecture may have some minor issues. As long as they were just warnings, it shouldn't be a problem.

As you get more familiar with a *nix system, you'll find you don't really need to do the Windows "three finger salute" and reboot the machine. Many times, it's as simple as just restarting the parent process that's been affected. A 'kill -HUP <process_ID>' or a 'pkill -HUP <process_name> will do it, or a 'service <service_name> restart will take care of it.

Mark

[forhire]

You mention "it ran with a couple errors posting". Were they actually errors, or just warnings?

The make issues will be fixed with the 0.99.7 release.

cant wait to DNC!!

Cool.

Do you have a CNC4 control? If so we have a longish thread going over on the emc2 forum... discussing replacement along with some dnc stuff and a couple machine mods I'm working on in preparation. Thought you might be interested.
http://www.linuxcnc.org/component/op.../lang,english/

[mkd]

forhire,
I'm hoping to DNC to Haas VF-3. this dedicated Linux PC just to pull programs from the network and load/drip to cnc.