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erainstruments / erasynth-firmware

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Command to disable all the printing to the serial port #6

Open caenrigen opened 3 years ago

caenrigen commented 3 years ago

Hi folks!

We have 3 ERASynth modules and are trying to use it in automated experiments that requires reliability and fast communication. Unfortunately the serial communication with the instruments is terrible for that.

Namely, why are the debug prints enabled by default? https://github.com/erainstruments/erasynth-firmware/blob/e5cb59e035118b64289c049b63fbc3ab8316ff1e/ERASynth/ERASynth.ino#L103

Beside that, there are a lot of other print statements to the serial that are not safe-guarded with the if (isDebugEnabled).

I would suggest adding a serial command that allowed to disable all the printing to the serial port except when the device configurations are queried from the device. This would allow to have a nice python driver.

@berjk @edensrock can any of you comment on this?

also, are PR welcome?

PS thank you for bringing these devices to the world, nonetheless :)

berjk commented 3 years ago

Hi

Debug prints helped us very well with remote repairs so we decided to enable it by default. You can send ">D0\n\r" to disable, ">D1\n\r" to enable debug messaged. This will prevent most of the messages to be printed out. It does not fully disable but this can be optimized.

PR is welcomed.

Thank you.

caenrigen commented 3 years ago

Hi!

Thank you for your reply, I realized there was the ">PD0\r"/">PD1\r" command for that after diving a bit into the code, it is unfortunately not documented in the commands PDF.

There seems to be also some print statements coming from the ESP module. Could you outline roughly the steps of compiling that piece of code and uploading?

So far I was able to compile the ERASynth code and change the firmware using the Arduino IDE.

After playing a bit with it it seems that the communication over serial is still not very reliable, the biggest problem seem to be that sending commands one after another one (somewhat fast from a python program) does not work always, even when actually getting a reply back from the instrument (in response from the previous command which would indicate that the instrument should be ready to receive the next command). I was basically trying to setup a deterministic communication that would issue the next command only after the previous one has been executed. Any ideas on making this work correctly are welcome.

berjk commented 3 years ago

This video will help you for uploadiing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkO0RTHWFcM

For proper serial communication you have to wait for a while after sending command to the device. If you send back to back commands, the device might lose bytes from serial communication due to process of current command. Send command and wait at least 100ms.

We do not use command acknowledgement.

caenrigen commented 3 years ago

This video will help you for uploadiing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkO0RTHWFcM

For proper serial communication you have to wait for a while after sending command to the device. If you send back to back commands, the device might lose bytes from serial communication due to process of current command. Send command and wait at least 100ms.

We do not use command acknowledgement.

Thank you! :)