On Fri, 21 Jul 2000, Andrew Robinson wrote:

> This is a preliminary and poorly thought out question. I apologize for that.
> Basically I want to know about accessing a PC-type serial device through the
> serial port on a SE/30 running NetBSD.
> 
> Because of roof repairs at work, the company's weather station is sitting in
> my backyard right now. It has a radio link to a receiver with a PC-type 9
> pin D serial connection. At work, that serial connector is connected to an
> HP Apollo workstation and the station readings are gathered by a tcl script.
> 
> I have a couple of 9-pin D to 8-pin Mac serial adapters for my digital
> camera and Palm Pilot. Can I use one of those to connect the weather station
> radio receiver to my SE/30? Is there anything special about accessing the
> serial port in this way? If so, would some kind soul point me to a reference
> on how to set it up.

That should probably work. These adapters are pretending to be the
back-end of a PC, so it should work out. Since I don't know the exact
pinouts, how you deal with hardware flow control might be tricly.

Look at what the tcl script does - does it tweak the serial port settings
any? You probably want to use dty00 or dty01 rather than tty00 or tty01 so
you don't end up waiting for DCD to be asserted.

Take care,

Bill