Trouble with Generic Serial Passthrough/StarTech RS232 hub

[pbohannon]

Hi there,

Apologies for the likely dumb question. I've a Panasonic PT-AE8000U projector and I'd like to use RS232 to send simple on and off commands. I bought a StarTech 8 port RS232/Serial hub (via USB), and the CQC server OS (Windows 8) recognizes the new COM ports immediately upon installation.

I set the driver up with the correct comm parameters and the Driver Status shows it as "online". However, when I try to configure an Action within a Button, I get an error: An error occurred while looking up the field PanasonicSerialDriver.SendTextMsg. Clicking on the Details button, I get: Driver 'PanasonicSerialDriver' does not seem to be loaded at this time. However, again, the Admin interface shows the driver as Online.

Am I using the correct action sequence to just write a text stream to the COM port?

Thanks for any advice!

[Dean Roddey]

Is the driver actually cycling between off and online by any chance? If you select it in the host admin dialog, and look at the driver stats on the right, are any of the lost connection, etc... status creeping up fairly quickly?

We already have a Panasonic AE900 driver, and it's a PDL driver so it should be pretty simple. You might consider seeing if you can adapt it, if this higher end model uses the same protocol. Do the commands involve text values like POF and PON, QFZ, IIS and the like? That's what the current driver uses and it might not be too hard to create a variation.

[pbohannon]

Is the driver actually cycling between off and online by any chance? If you select it in the host admin dialog, and look at the driver stats on the right, are any of the lost connection, etc... status creeping up fairly quickly?

We already have a Panasonic AE900 driver, and it's a PDL driver so it should be pretty simple. You might consider seeing if you can adapt it, if this higher end model uses the same protocol. Do the commands involve text values like POF and PON, QFZ, IIS and the like? That's what the current driver uses and it might not be too hard to create a variation.

Hey there, thanks for the quick response! So, first thing's first.. the driver does not seem to be Cycling. It stays in an Online state and no error counters seem to be incrementing.

Weirdly enough when installing the AE900 driver, I get pretty much the same error message. To be clear, the error pops up in the Action Editor, when I click "Value" after having selected the Field. The fields look to be populated correctly for both the generic Serial driver and the AE900 driver as well.

On the latest attempt, with the AE900 driver, I got:

An error occurred while looking up field PanasonicAE900Driver.Power

then clicking Details, I got:

Facility: CQCKit, Error#:6006/0/0
Severity: Failed, Error Class: Not Found
Line: CQCKit_ThisFacility.cpp/2354

Driver 'PanasonicAE900Driver' does not seem to be loaded at this time

/CQC/CQCServer/Drivers/PanasonicAE900 Driver

Sorry to cause some churn here.. but any ideas? Thanks again

[Dean Roddey]

Can you go to the Field Browser window in the Admin Interface and modify the driver fields?

[pbohannon]

Can you go to the Field Browser window in the Admin Interface and modify the driver fields?

So, I couldn't, originally. After reading your reply I went to the Field Browser and the driver did not show up in the drop-down (although again I was able to verify it was "Online" from the Admin Server Drivers page).

I ended up rebooting (since I don't yet know what services to simply start/restart to force a "CQC reboot"), and the driver came up just fine. I'm now able to add an action appropriately (not that it's functional yet) and insofar as I can tell, I'm sending a text string to the projector.

Weird that I've had to reboot a few times - first, additions to my Insteon/UD 994i were not available through the CQC interface until it restarted; then for the aforementioned Serial driver issue. If there's a more sane way to restart CQC services than simply rebooting would you mind to mention it? Actually, I think I recall the first tutorial video maybe mentioning this, so I'll head back there to take a look.

Sorry for verbosity but figured I'd give the whole lay of the land in case something sounded interesting insofar as getting more info.

[Dean Roddey]

Something is definitely not right if newly added drivers are not showing up. The field browser and the action dialog both get their information from the exact same place, so something has be awry for them not to agree.

Is this a single machine system? I.e. you only have CQC on one machine? Or are the drivers on a different machine from what you are looking at the Admin Intf on?

And you don't have more than one CQC Master Server installed in your system, do you?


The CQC Application Shell is the background services, so cycling that is effectively cycling CQC. But, you should never need to do it for anything like that.

[pbohannon]

Something is definitely not right if newly added drivers are not showing up. The field browser and the action dialog both get their information from the exact same place, so something has be awry for them not to agree.

Is this a single machine system? I.e. you only have CQC on one machine? Or are the drivers on a different machine from what you are looking at the Admin Intf on?

And you don't have more than one CQC Master Server installed in your system, do you?


The CQC Application Shell is the background services, so cycling that is effectively cycling CQC. But, you should never need to do it for anything like that.

Sorry about the late reply! So, unfortunately my answers here are boring. I have just one CQC server and all drivers, etc. are resident on the same single server. It's an Intel NUC (probably irrelevant) running Win8.

I'm happy to do any debugging or reproducing you'd like if you think it'd be valuable. However, the AE900 driver is now installed and working fine with no modifications needed (yet).

I do have 4 devices to add to my Insteon PLC/ISY994i this week, so I'll let you know via this thread if they don't automatically update from the perspective of the Field browser or otherwise.

[LesAuber]

Pure WAG but are you using a null modem cable? Can't say for sure about Panasonic but every other PJ I've connected, Sony, Anthem(JVC), has been null modem. Should be in the protocol as to whether straight through or null modem (crossover).