Serial Binding issue

[mortommy (Tommaso)]

Hi guys,
I’m experiencing an issue and I’m looking for clues to fix it.
I’d like to establish a communication with my Sharp Aquos TV via RS232 just to gives via openHAB information about its status. I’m using a null model RS232-USB cable and first of all I checked it using a pc and putty, I was able to establish a connection, send some commands to the TV and get back data from it. So the cable is ok.
Then I connected the cable to my raspberry pi 3 B where is running openhabian 1.3 and openHab 2.1 stable, installed via PAPER UI the Serial binding and created the items as:

String AquosSerial "Aquos Serial" (Multimedia) { serial="/dev/ttyUSB1@9600" }

After of course I verified the usb mount created for the cable.
If I make a test by screen, I’m again able to establish a communication, send commands to the TV and get back data. But if I send a command via Karaf to the item AquosSerial, I see in the log, after enabled the DEBUG level, the entries:

==> /var/log/openhab2/events.log <==
2018-03-21 12:39:05.035 [ItemCommandEvent          ] - Item 'AquosSerial' received command IAVD????\r
==> /var/log/openhab2/openhab.log <==
2018-03-21 12:39:05.042 [DEBUG] [binding.serial.internal.SerialDevice] - Writing 'IAVD????\r' to serial port /dev/ttyUSB1

But the item doesn’t get back any data. Looking at the serial binding the settings used are the same required by the television: 8 bit data length, 1 bit stop, no parity bit and FLOWCONTROL_NONE since is the gnu.io.SerialPort default.

the permission on usb device are:

ls -la /dev/ttyUSB1
crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 188, 1 Mar 21 12:39 /dev/ttyUSB1

and the openhab user is member of dialout

grep 'dialout' /etc/group
dialout:x:20:openhab,pi

I also added the entry in the start.sh file:

EXTRA_JAVA_OPTS="-Dgnu.io.rxtx.SerialPorts=/dev/ttyUSB1"

even if according to the documentation it seems not required.

Any ideas?

Thank you.

[matt1 (Skinah)]

I have not used the serial binding in a while but it also has not been updated so the following is probably still an issue. See here.

Serial binding is not sending values above 63 in Decimal or 0x3F in HEX

FIXED ! The solution was to add an environment variable to change the default charset. I will be getting a Raspberry to run this on so its also good to know the same fix will work on that too… Thanks to a post by John Malawic after 2 days of googling… On win7 add to environ variables JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS = -Dfile.encoding=ISO-8859-1 On raspberry I select en_US ISO-8859-1 and it’s ok also. Do not know if it’s the best solution. Better solution can be that serial binding provide a configurabl…

I have to write a binding using serial io soon so I may be able to help with an updated serial binding when I write mine.

[matt1 (Skinah)]

@mortommy I noticed that you are trying to send this command via the Karaf console when you replied in another thread…

This command contains the escape character (\) that openhab uses in strings:
POWR0 \r
What exactly do you want to send? Have you tried this?
POWR0 \\r

To help further it would be helpful if you connect the Null Modem cable you mention you have out of openhab and into a terminal program. Then tell us what you are TRYING to send out and what you see incoming to your terminal program. Once we confirm what is being sent out we can then look at the cause of you getting no replies.

Also you did not mention if you have tried different character sets (name which ones you have tried) as described as a new feature in the serial binding in the other thread…

Strange problem with serial binding

Hi @matt and @TheNetStriker, I tried the new binding copying the file in the addons folder (after I had uninstalled the previous version). When I edit the item file I can see the following entries in the log file: 2018-04-13 23:53:05.244 [DEBUG] [inding.serial.internal.SerialBinding] - Port: /dev/ttyUSB0 2018-04-13 23:53:05.245 [DEBUG] [inding.serial.internal.SerialBinding] - Baud rate: 9600 2018-04-13 23:53:05.247 [DEBUG] [binding.serial.internal.SerialDevice] - Serial port ‘/dev/ttyUSB0’…

[mortommy (Tommaso)]

Hi,
some good news here. First I set a character set, I tried UTF-8, and via Karaf console no luck. Just as test I tried to send a command via rule and… it worked, so in some way via Karaf is not working, even with the escape character “”

thank you.

[matt1 (Skinah)]

No problems, glad you are now working. If you could keep using the new serial binding build to help us with testing the changes please do and report any issues back in the other thread. Even if you don’t need the new features, we still need to know the changes don’t break anything else in the binding.

As for Karaf not working, I don’t know it (Karaf) at all so have no idea why or where to start looking as I have only used it for a total for 10 minutes and never needed to fault find with it.