killswtch's Home Automation and Media Projects
This is the story of my attempts at integrating various technologies into a 3-bed semi, constructing as much of the hardware and electronics as possible myself.
Saturday 10 May 2008, 8:38 PM
Hitch with the audio system
Today I started development of the software to control the whole-house audio system. It’s written in C# and based on the MiniHttpd project - a small but powerful implementation of a web server in C#.
However, when it came to testing the first bits of code, I’ve envountered a problem. A while ago I bought a 4 port RS232 serial card to go into boron, because the motherboard only has 1 onboard port which isn’t enough for the UPS, the matrix switcher and probably some other things such as connections to network switches.
The new card shows up fine in lspci, seems to be ok when running setserial -gb, but when trying to send or receive data nothing happens. Thinking it might be a conflict with the onboard port, I went into the BIOS and disabled it. Still nothing. So I swapped the card into another machine and re-enabled the onboard port in boron’s BIOS. Now the onboard port doesn’t work either.
I’m going to contact the manufacturer of the card for some help. But for the onboard port I’m completely stumped. It too shows up in lspci and setserial -gb (though only when running using sudo, which wasn’t necessary before) but any attempts to use the port result in various I/O error messages. I was worried that the new card may have killed the serial communication capabilities of the matrix switcher and the UPS, but I’ve confirmed that at least the matrix switcher still works by connecting it to my test machine, iron.
If anyone thinks they might know what’s getting on, please get in contact via the comments for this post - I would be very greatful for any help.
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