XCOMMS XC_GET XC_FLUSH

[m_holti]

Hello!

I am trying to rewrite some software where a scale is addressed
through the RS232 port and using commands like xc_get, xc_flush and
so
on.
I belive that these commands was developed by a company called Xcomms.
I do
not have a manual for the commands and would really appriciate some
expanation for the command xc_get or an address where to find more
info.


Thanks in advance,
Matilda

 

[jacob navia]

Hello!

I am trying to rewrite some software where a scale is addressed
through the RS232 port and using commands like xc_get, xc_flush and
so
on.
I belive that these commands was developed by a company called Xcomms.
I do
not have a manual for the commands and would really appriciate some
expanation for the command xc_get or an address where to find more
info.


Thanks in advance,
Matilda

You are in a bad situation Matilda but I do not think in this group
you will find somebody that knows what xc_get does...

From the name it seems that it is for getting a character I would say, but
you will have to find the manual, or an address of that company if you
want to know more.

 

[Malcolm McLean]

I am trying to rewrite some software where a scale is addressed
through the RS232 port and using commands like xc_get, xc_flush and
so on.
I belive that these commands was developed by a company called Xcomms.
I do not have a manual for the commands and would really appriciate some
expanation for the command xc_get or an address where to find more
info.

We are currently having a topicality discussion on this ng. Yopur post
illustrates the problem.
ANSI C defines no way to access any hardware except the standard IO
functions. However C will ususally, along with assembler, be the language of
choice for low-level communication with devices such as an RS232 port.

There are millions of C-callable functions released by various companies,
and unless xc_get() is an especially common protocol then it is unlikely
that anyone here will have used it. I've certainly never heard of it,
although the function obviously reads bytes of data from the port, and if
you posted the code I could probably tell you what it does.

However should we go down that route? I don't think there really is another
group that exactly matches your requirements or I'd redirect you to it.

 

[Tor Rustad]

Hello!

I am trying to rewrite some software where a scale is addressed
through the RS232 port and using commands like xc_get, xc_flush and
so
on.
I belive that these commands was developed by a company called Xcomms.
I do
not have a manual for the commands and would really appriciate some
expanation for the command xc_get or an address where to find more
info.

Welcome to the world of reverse-engineering.

A while back I had a similar problem, some old software we had to load
cryptographic keys into a security module via serial communication,
didn't handle the size of our growing keytable one day.

There was no library, or documentation ever published on this interface.
I talked to the people our lab, and borrowed an ancient protocol
analyzer. Then, by looking at the bytes transfered over the wire, figure
out the protocol and guessing the crc-32 algorithm, was not too hard.

With that information at hand, the rest was just implementing a new
RS-232 library, and follow the reversed engineered keyload protocol. The
hardware module never knew we switched the keyload software.

A couple of books, like e.g.

"C Programmer's Gude to serial Programming", by Joe Campbell
"The working programmer's guide to - Serial Protocols", by Tom Kientzle

was useful to me, I'm sure there are more modern books available now.