RB110. Cant use com port 3 4 5 and 6

[kiwibrisa]

Hi there. I purchased a RB110 for my humanoid project a few weeks ago. Have installed windows, vga, lan and ftdi drivers and it seems to be running nicely.

I can use Com 1 just like a normal com port the problem is I cant communicate with any of the other ports ie com 3 4 5 and 6.
In the device manager only ports 1 2 3 and 4 show up. 3 and 4 are called USB Serial Ports when they should just be Communications ports.
When I try and use 2 3 or 4 it just says they are already in use and if I try use 4 and 5 it says they don’t exist.

Heres a picture from the XP installation guide from the Roboard site.



Heres a screen shot of my com ports.



I had previously installed windows a different way (had the same comport problems) so I installed it following the RB instructions but with the same result.

What am I doing wrong? Do I need to initiate anything? Install libraries?

I want to run my wck servos, so I assume I should be using com 3 or 4?

[roboard]

Hi,

you may check whether COM3 & COM4 are enabled in BIOS.

please go to BIOS->Chipset->Southbridge Configuration->Serial/Parallel Port Configuration to check this; if COM3 & COM4 are disabled, you must enable them.

It is sugguested to set the address for COM3 = 3E8, IRQ = 10 and set the address for COM4 = 2E8, IRQ = 11.

[kiwibrisa]

Yeah that was the problem. Found that out about half an hour after i posted this. Was reading through the instructions and it said you can change baud rates in the bios so thought id have a look and found two were disabled. Cheers for the info on what to set the address to I had just guessed them.haha

Do you have any idea why when i leave the board for say a day without turning it on it always wants to do a disc check? Im running xp lite. It seems to only happen when i leave it for a long time.

[jpatek]

OK, but what about COM 5 and 6 (or ttyS4 and ttyS5, since I use Linux) ?

[josh]

Hi,

The RB-110's COM 5 and 6 are used with FTDI chip.

And Linux kernel 2.6.9 or greater has already included FTDI 2232H VCP Driver.

But, if you use other Linux kernel, you must download FTDI 2232H VCP driver from

http://www.ftdichip.com/Drivers/VCP.htm

If you use Ubuntu or Debian, you can type "dmesg|grep ttyUSB" in terminal mode.

You will see ttyUSB0(COM 5) and ttyUSB1(COM 6).

[jpatek]

Thanks! Was I asleep at the switch ... should have made the connection between FTDI and USB ... instead I was looking for them as regular serial ports (/dev/ttyS). Solves that problem and thanks again.