ken.gentry

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  • March 10, 2016 at 3:12 pm in reply to: Multiple TinyG boards on single PC #9423
    ken.gentry
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    Agreed. USB device enumeration at startup could cause swapping of the ports. I worked on an embedded Linux project with A side and B side printers. When the unit rebooted there was no guarantee the printers would come up on the correct port. Luckily we had a great working relationship with the printer manufacturer and they helped us figure out a reliable scheme to deal with this.

    Certain FTDI USB/serial devices have EEPROM where a serial number is stored. This could be sniffed and used in a manual configuration step to specify “Board A has serial number 12345” and “Board B has serial number 54321”. Then the controller could figure out which is which without much pain.

    Thanks,
    Ken

    March 9, 2016 at 4:21 pm in reply to: Multiple TinyG boards on single PC #9420
    ken.gentry
    Member

    Wanted to supply more details. I work for a company that makes point of sale equipment. We are attempting to automate transactions on the system and a physical credit card terminal. Our existing automation app generates click events on the register screen to purchase items. At the end of the sale we need to physically swipe a payment card and possibly answer prompts on the pin pad.

    A mechanical engineer at our company is almost finished building a desktop sized CNC machine that will move around and press keys on the pin pad. There will two more axes that will bring a card around and swipe it through the terminal’s card slot.

    The XYZ motion for the keypad will be fully independent of the card swipe XY motion.

    We will most likely add add a card carousel in the future that could be spun by a stepper and the card handling motion could coordinate with it.

    So I’m hoping we can connect two TinyG boards to the same computer then send keypress motion control to one board and card swipe motion control to the other board.

    We do not care about the two TinyG boards working together. We just need two boards to show up on separate COM ports and allow our automation app to send commands to the two boards independently.

    Budget for this is not a concern at all. Buying two TinyG boards would work for us.

    Thanks for any help.

    Ken

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