Running on Windows smells like trouble: Possible serial drain issue

[techninja]

It always seems at conventions and conferences while running exhaustive demos is when I find bugs. I have just today confirmed through a very specific test that something about windows 10 is causing a very bad problem: Missed commands, or simply, missed offsets.

Release RoboPaint running CNCServer stock:

• Linux: is happy as a clam (assuming you add the damn user to dialout and/or remove modemmanager package,) sigh
• Windows: Seems fine, connects well, but... wend queuing lots of data, or sending large sets of instructions.. some get regularly lost at a very low level, and will result in the bot getting offset as if it had slipped.
• Windows with a VM running CNCserver: By using the same computer remote server connection through virtualbox, the issue basically goes away, proving that the problem does not lie in RoboPaint, and does not surface on Linux.

I suspect this is because of bad code on the side of node-serialport for windows to verify serial drain. Their current release is v5, and we're on v2. Switching to v5+ may not be such a simple thing as the API has likely changed considerably... though I have to admit we're not using it much, or at least very much for code.

[techninja]

Apparently this was a known problem and fixed in some recent version released in January. Tested on windows this is now working!...or rather, not breaking in that way anymore. Though the "sudden stop" is still a problem. Will be looking into what this is and why soon. Initial experiments with Express 4 have yielded terrible breaking changes with no chance to test for improvements. 😖

[techninja]

"Sudden stop" confirmed as dire and reproducible issue in development branch, recorded as EmergingTechnologyAdvisors/node-serialport#1188, though I doubt this will get traction without more details.

[techninja]

Managed in v3...