[Xastir] bluetooth serial port issues

[Alex Carver]

--- On Mon, 4/21/08, Jason KG4WSV wrote:
> I'm trying to do some cable reduction on my xastir
> mobile rig, and I
> bought a bluetooth/rs232 dongle (
> http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/412767-REG/Iogear_GBS301_Serial_Adapter_with_Bluetooth.html
> ) to play with. If conditions are perfect, it works fine. 
> Since
> Murphy rides shotgun on balloon chases, though, I decided a
> little
> testing under sub-optimal conditions was in order.
> 
> rig is xastir 1.8.3, mac os X 10.4.latest on a PPC laptop,
> Garmin MAP60C.
> 
> For the first test, I wondered what would happen if the
> dongle lost
> power.  The answer:  Bad Things.  xastir locked up. hard.
> as in, kill
> -9 wouldn't kill it.  Yep, managed to create a
> situation that required
> a reboot to clean up, and that doesn't happen often on
> my macs.
> 
> So, the xastir related question: is this a problem with
> serial port
> error handling?  I've had less than pleasant
> experiences when a
> USB/232 adapter lost connectivity, but this was much worse.
>  Is it
> even possible to detect/recover from this condition? 
> I've brought up
> the subject of retries on serial ports (feature request
> 1715100), but
> this probably goes beyond that.
> 
> ideas? clues? suggestions?


My suggestion would be to try and isolate Xastir from the serial port.  Get something like a serial port replicator software package that can create virtual ports and connect them to real ports (I know there's GPSGate for windows but I don't know if there's one for OS X).  Then just have one virtual port connected to the one real port.  Have Xastir connect to the virtual port which will always exist.  If the real serial port vanishes, the replicator software should be able to survive.


      ____________________________________________________________________________________
Be a better friend, newshound, and 
know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile.  Try it now.  http://mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i62sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ