[Xastir] Xastir and Ultimeter weather station

[Alex Carver]

--- Steve Jones <steve.jones at rogers.com> wrote:
> Since Weather Display generates my weather webserver
> pages, I'll be  
> keeping it around for the forseeable future.
> 
> I could split off another serial connection from the
> Ultimeter but  
> that would mean hanging another usb to serial
> adaptor off of my  
> computer which I would rather not do.
> 
> Any suggestions?

I'm not sure how Xastir handles weather data, so I'll
leave that to someone else to answer (though I'm
curious for the eventual time when I can actually put
up a weather station).

If Xastir wants a serial port instead of a file to
read from, then you have a couple ways of sharing the
port.  The easiest way is obviously the second serial
dongle if you're intending to keep two completely
different machines.

The harder way that doesn't require an additional
adapter is to use a few bits of software to create
virtual serial ports with the possibility of
connecting them over the network.

This second method depends on the configuration.  If
you can move your weather web page over to the Mac,
you can compile and run everything under OS X.  If you
don't move it, you'll have to find software to work on
both the Mac (compiled or otherwise) and on the
Windows machine.

Leaving the server on the Windows machine:  The
Windows machine would have to create two virtual ports
and share one over the network.  The Mac would create
a virtual serial port via a network connection to the
Windows machine.  There's software for splitting up
ports on Windows and making them available over
network connections but I don't know how well they
work.  Some of them are commercial so you'll be
paying.  I think one that's rather popular is Franson
GPSGate.  The Mac only has to run a program called
'socat' which can turn a network connection into a
virtual serial port.

Moving the server to the Mac:  The Mac would be
running three small programs.  One would be 'ser2net'
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ser2net/ which can
create a network connection to a serial port but
allows multiple connections to that network port (as I
understand it).  Then the Mac runs two copies of socat
to create two virtual serial ports.

-Alex


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