On 11/15/2011 5:12 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
On Tue, 15 Nov 2011 15:28:13 -0500, Ken Schneider - openSUSE wrote:
And there is a serial/usb dongle that will allow you to still usr serial devices. At least I have one that I may auction off sometime in the future. :-)
Yep, I've got one of those in order to apply updates to my Harmon-Kardon sound system.
Jim
You're lucky it actually worked! The H/K not the usb serial dongle. I tried to do that for my brother's H/K surround amp, Some model that ends in 247, and could not get a clean working connection. It was the H/K NOT the dongle or the laptop since I use both routinely all the time to connect to several kinds of devices including PDU's and UPS's that don't have anything but a serial connection, terminal/port/console servers, switches. But the H/K updater just would not work at all, and when I googled and finally found some posts on a developer forum that showed what the actual serial port settings the updater wants to use, and used teraterm and putty to connect instead of the updater util, I could see that it wasn't generating clean consistent output. The devel posts said what to expect, send this, expect that response etc, it worked enough to show that it was at least connected and responding, but it was acting like a classic bad serial connection, lots of dropped output, inconsistent output etc, except the wiring was perfect and I even had 3 different dongles with me and 3 different serial cables from dongle to amplifier. Further googling enlightened me that many other people have the same problem and the consensus is the units simply suck and the uart or something else related to serial port access is simply crap and 25 to 50 percent of units don't actually have that function working. Some people managed to get their unit updated by just trying over and over again and after 10 or 30 times it worked once by luck. I friggn love days like that. Got my brothers entertainment console all apart all day one sunday, no one can watch tv, kids can't play ps3 or wii, dogs are whining stuck in their cages because I can't have them banging around, and after a couple solid hours of trying to employ my famous "I always win" wizard powers to overcome crappy tools and crappy instructions and utter lack of detailed documentation, and get the job done _anyways_, and in the end still end up not having got the job done. Some people's machines got bricked and others simply failed to update, and some people were able to get their machines warranty replaced, but of course my brothers was out of warranty and we didn't have the receipt anyway. -- bkw -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org