On Thursday 31 October 2024 11:30:04 pm wn4isx wrote:
A cousin was a programmer at MS (Yea I know how I must hang my head in shame and wear ashcloth) and she said find some MS guru who can decipher the INI file, determine what is being done and rewrite it for LINUX.
I asked and she passed on the chance, she's a new mother of twins so her spare time is measured in nanoseconds.
This is the wiki entry (yea how very informative)
That was interesting, but a configuration for what? That *.exe file? What I need is to find out what this hardware does, not their software.
(snip)
You might be forced to use a windows platform
There ain't enough force to make that happen here...
and USB data monitor to figure out what is being commanded.
Now there's some possibilities. I don't have such a thing, but maybe a thing I do have can be adapted? Do you have one? And if so, which one?
[Bourbon does not solve all programming problems, it just feels that way for a little while.]
I don't tend to go near any computing device when I'm indulging in that stuff.
(snip)
I have here a little device that calls itself a "Logic Analyzer" and to the best of my recollection it shows you different stuff in the software that interprets various protocols. I don't recall what software is used with it offhand, unfortunately, so I probably need to seek out that video and download it, watch it again. It's USB on one side, and a bunch of pins on the other, connected like a lot of arduino stuff. The example use I remember showed this thing looking at an SPI connection on which the arduino was scanning and looking for connected devices, and the addresses put out there showed up in the software that this interfaced with. Looked for it, and I found this one:
and it's I2C, not SPI that he's messing with, but you'll get the idea. I don't have the exact unit he has in the video, but it's basically the same thing. I expect mine was even cheaper. :-)
Now whether or not that will turn out to be useful depends entirely on whether that battery tester actually does something on its own. When I plug its USB cable into my hub, it does come alive, and it does seem to do something when I select the print option, but I haven't got the computer to see what it's doing just yet. To go further I'm gonna need to make a USB breakout cord, and hook it up to this. Or at least scope the data lines and see if there's anything happening there.
If the battery tester is relying on the windoze software to command it to do something, then I'm probably screwed.
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin
