using PC/104 serial expansion board with WinCE, 4 serial ports total
You can use the Remote Registry Editor from eVC, assuming your device has
persistent registry capability. You'd copy the entries for
HKLM/Drivers/BuiltIn/Serial which refer to the serial port, creating
HKLM/Drivers/BuiltIn/Serial3, Serial4, Serial5, etc. (assuming you already
have Serial and Serial2 for COM1 and COM2). You'd change the IoBase address
to match the corresponding port's base address on the PC/104 board, and the
Irq entries to match the IRQ for each port (*definitely* set up the ports to
use their own interrupts). You would also change the value of the Order key
so that COM1 will have Order of 0, COM2 Order of 1, COM3 order of 2, etc. I
think that's it.
Once you've changed the registry, do whatever the OEM tells you to do to
persist the registry, then do a hard reset and the drivers should be loaded.
After the system is rebooted, return to Remote Registry Editor and check
HKLM/Drivers/Active for entries for the new serial ports. If they are
there, the Device Manager thinks they are working and you can write a
program to open each one and try it out.
Paul T.
Quote:
> Thanks for the response, Paul.
> I don't know if I have extra interrupts to dedicate to the extra ports,
but
> I might be able to free up some manually for this application. The board
> does support individual interrupts for each of the ports, but is
> configurable to share IRQ's also.
> I've never done much with registry entries before, is that a pretty simple
> process? Do you know of any documentation on how I would do that, I have
the
> MSDN installed? (Sorry I'm a bit of a newbie in CE)
> Thanks!
> Brett
> > That depends on the board's characteristics. There are no serial
drivers
> in
> > CE that are set up to handle sharing of interrupts between ports (which
is
> > quite likely on any four-port card). If the interrupts are not shared,
> you
> > may be able to just use a couple of extra registry entries to add
support
> > for the new ports.
> > Paul T.
> > > Hi everyone,
> > > I am not yet developing with CE, but am considering it for an
embedded,
> > > screen-less, automation application that we have. We will be using a
> > PC/104
> > > computer with 2 onboard serial ports, but since the application needs
4
> > > ports we will use a serial expansion card. The serial expansion card
we
> > have
> > > in mind has a setting that states "dos" or "winnt/98" modes, but
> otherwise
> > I
> > > can't find any specific "supports CE" mentions on any board of this
> type.
> > > I asked the vendor about using the expansion board to use 4 serial
ports
> > > under CE and got a response about them making a special CE (3.0 I
think)
> > > image to make it work (and charging a non-recurring engineering fee
> > too..).
> > > I would think that something as powerful as CE would have the ability
to
> > > easily access 4 serial ports without much customization. Is this more
a
> > > problem of building the right image using platform builder, or might
it
> > > require writing some "custom drivers"?
> > > Thanks!
> > > Brett