开云体育

So I have this battery tester, which was discussed in here not all that long ago. One of the menu options is to print the results, which I'm assuming is stored in some kind of flash memory or similar. The documentation talks about using a CD, which didn't come with the unit, but which can be obtained from their web site. The illustration in the documentation shows two options, print and clear the data.

Unfortunately on downloading the "CD" I find only two files in there, an *.ini file and an *.exe file, meaning it's for windoze only. and I don't run windoze here at all, only linux, and that's the way it's been since 1999. It's been suggested in another mailing list that I might try installing windoze in a virtual machine or similar, I'm not gonna go there.

When I connect a USB cable to the unit and connect that to this computer, the device wakes up, and I can go through the menus and such. Trying the print option, I see "print wait" for a little bit, and then it returns to the menu. Looking at log files on the computer, it does see the device but doesn't seem to know what to do with it. I can provide a log snippet if anybody thinks that might be useful.

The log entries tell me that the device seen in a CH340 chip. I've used these before, while playing with an ESP32 and in the Arduino environment, so I know that will talk to devices. I'm just not sure how to best proceed from here.

The company has been most unhelpful, their advice continually recommending that I try it on a windoze machine in spite of me telling them that's not an option and how I need to know what the device expects, and they're not providing that information for me.

Any thoughts on how I might proceed from here? It would be real handy to be able to keep some records on the computer of what test results I end up with...


--
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

On Thursday 31 October 2024 02:05:35 pm wn4isx wrote:

1) find a friend with a windoze machine....

Don't know anybody that does that.

2) Use Wine or anyone of the at least dozen windoze emulators.

Ain't gonna happen.

Image your PC before installing Wine and the Windoze program, after you finish, nuke the PC to bare metal and reinstall your image. That's what I do when I need to load a troublesome, or questionable, program.

This machine running two versions of linux, one in a virtual machine where I do my emails, that would be way too complicated.

That way I know my PC is clean, well clean as far as Windoze goes.

No such thing.

I suspect Micro$loth has enough back doors, intentional and due to utter and total incompetence, to last a life time.

Yup. Not mine, though.

My lab and radio PCs are air gapped, with the WiFi network turned off. They can talk to each other via Ethernet. Now if only my lab test gear all had Ethernet....

There's ways...

All I know about Linux is ' Terry don't do Linux.'

That's a shame.

Except in his android phones, which he f-ing hates.

The alternatives are worse. I've gone through mine, did a "force stop" and "disable" on a bunch of stuff, denied permissions on a bunch of other stuff, it's a bit less obnoxious than out of the box. Google seems to want to continue to roll out new stuff, some of it now AI-based, and I continue to decline to participate in any of it.

My mother tied me on a leash to our clothes line when I was 4 to keep me out of the street the instant her back was turned, she unleashed me when I was about 5 and a half and my phones make me feel like I'm on a leash again. Have to carry them because of medical crap.

Go into settings and see what you can fiddle with...

I really have no choice about running Windoze 7.

Yeah ya do.

I have several expensive audio analysis programs that will not run under Linux and any emulator so far.

There's stuff out there. Depends on what you want to do. We can kick that around in here or directly, your choice.

I was responsible for two small Unix machines for 10 years or so. One was well behaved, the other needed 100 pounds of C4 and an abandoned quarry.

Heh.

At work I avoided Wang, I avoided Apple (pre mac) Apple (post mac) and survived Windows FWG.

I worked with a dealer some years back that sold Wang PCs, *not* at all "compatible". I took great pleasure in scrapping the one I ended up with later on. Did a service call for a lawyer (spit!) for a Wang "word procesor" that was so big it was built into a desk, I ended up scrapping his printer when he stiffed me on the bill. Very early apple stuff might've been fun, but the closest I got to that was ending up with a Franklin (apple II clone, they got sued bigtime) and the thought of populating that with all of the LSTTL it wanted, getting compatible disk drives and keyboard, and so on put me off until I sold it to some kid with more enthusiasm than I had for the project. I might still have a set of EPROMs that I was given to put in that board, I don't recall. I have out in the garage a complete IIgs system, which I hear has some nice sound capabilities, got the unit, monitor, two different size drives, keyboard, etc. that I was given some years back, and I've never even fired it up. We were given an ipad a while back, trying to do anything at all with that turned out to be a complete exerise in frustration. I think they've done some interesting things with hardware, and liked the early open nature of things, but can't deal with their corporate arroganc, not at all.

/rant

--
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

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

On Friday 01 November 2024 01:29:28 pm Roy J. Tellason, Sr. wrote:

Looked for it, and I found this one:

In the suggested stuff that showed up after viewing that was this one:



A lot shorter, and the unit pictured resembles the one I've got. He even does some USB stuff with it, nice to know that's in there. I like the way he made his breakout connector, though I don't have any of those connectors on hand here. I'll probably just butcher a cable, I guess.

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