Serial Communications

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Serial Communications
CodeSharkFCs uses the TurboPower Async Professional componet to handle serial port communications.
The Reference Guide and Developers Guide for this component can be found at:
AysncPro Documentation
There have been instances of CodeSharkFCs not sending out the last block of data to the receiving device. The problem appears to be
that AsyncPro informs the controlling program (CodeSharkFCs) that file transmission is complete before that actual final characters are
transmitted out the device's or Window's i/o buffer. This results in CodeSharkFCs closing the serial port prior to the complete transmission
of data. Once the serial port is closed, serial transmission stops. The Close Port Timeout setting has been added as a work around for this issue.
When using CodeSharkFCs for DNC, the user may need to adjust the timeout depending on the lenght of time need for the machine tool to complete
the final machining blocks.
This issue may be a result of the changes made to the AsyncPro dispatcher at release 4.07, but still unknown.
From the TurboPower Async Professional readme.txt file:
4.2 Release 4.07
Enhancements
------------
The serial port dispatcher was completely rewritten to make it less
vulnerable to poorly behaved (blocking) event handlers. The new
dispatcher will continue to buffer serial port input until it runs
out of memory for buffers if any of the user's event handlers block.
The output thread of the dispatcher is now double buffered to allow
output to be written to the serial port while the user's thread
continues to work. This improves throughput for some file transfer
protocols like zmodem.
If you encounter problems when using the new serial port dispatcher,
define the conditional UseAwWin32 and rebuild your project and / or
packages. This will disable the new dispatcher and use the 4.06
dispatcher in its place. If your problem goes away after doing this
then you have probably discovered a bug in the new dispatcher and you
should report it via the support news groups.
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