I would like to know if anyone has tried communicating between the Teleperm ME operating system Teleperm ME OS220EA which is a UNIX based
Server and a PC for events and alarm logging instead of a printer. Pls contact if so.

 

I haven't done it with that particular system but I've done it frequently with with all kinds of other systems. I was in the hospital systems business and we used this to capture data for
system migration. UNIX systems are usually easy because you can set up a serial printer and just use a terminal program on the PC. IF they use a parallel printer, it's usually possible to simply
rename the specialfile and replace it with a serial specialfile and do the above. Any local UNIX hacker should be able to do this for you. IF you run Linux on the PC you don't even need a terminal program. you just set up the port and cat from the port to a file. You can pipe through tee to sen a copy to the screen as well. This is just shell games under *nix.

Regards

cww
--
Free Tools!
Machine Automation Tools (LinuxPLC) Free, Truly Open & Publicly Owned Industrial Automation Software For Linux. mat.sourceforge.net.
Day Job: Heartland Engineering, Automation & ATE for Automotive Rebuilders.
Consultancy: Wide Open Technologies: Moving Business & Automation to Linux.

 

Simple! You do get the alarms and logs and measurements sent to the MMI systems, don't you?
Pick it up from there.

 

This is usually as simple as running a terminal emulator on the PC and, if neccessary, changing the termcap or terminfo entry for the port. The only real issue I've see is that some serial printers did weird stuff with the hardware control lines. If you can make the port happy so it can be opened, the data usually flows and the system has no idea it's not talking to a printer. Device independence is part of the beauty of UNIX.
I normally use a small C program for this so I can filter out the control chars and format the output but, the terminal emulator will usually get you by. If you want to, you can use one PC to replace a dozen printers this way with a multiport
card. Using a program, you can prepend ID so you can sort it all out later. Really handy for older equipment that's not very flexible. Of course, I assume you know that you can also simply replace the port specialfile on the UNIX box with a pipe or even a simple file and avoid using a PC altogether. This is UNIX, it was written to do what _you_ want it to do. If you want to try that drop me a line. The commands to do that might
gag the command line challanged among us but, it's fairly simple. A device, any device, is simply a file under UNIX, so you can usually replace one type with another if you wish. You will probably need to be root to do this.

Regards

cww (wideopen @ecenet.com)