Galileo TriMix / IrDA

[Jef Driesen]

On 30-04-13 14:39, William Perry wrote:
> I am looking at switching to Subsurface so that I can just keep a linux VM
> floating around to download dives from my Galileo (Trimix) instead of a
> Windows VM and the 'fabulous' SmarTrak software from ScubaPro.  I am running
> this Ubuntu 13.04 VM in Parallels 8 at the moment and am having issues
> getting this to download anything at all with a generic mcs7780 USB adapter.
> I expect it is an issue with the low-level IR stack, but the IRDA
> documentation leaves a bit to be desired.

You are running Linux in a VM? Maybe that's part of the problem. Usually running 
in a VM works fine, but in some cases it doesn't. Have you tried on a real machine?

Can you send the output of libdivecomputer's smart test app? That might give us 
a clue where it fails. Does it fail opening the irda socket, during device 
discovery, or during the actual communication?

> The irda0 driver gets loaded successfully and I have modified
> /etc/default/irda-utils to set
> DEVICE=irda0
> AUTOMATIC=true
> DISCOVERY=true
>
> And irattach gets launched successfully when I plug in the USB device, but it
> just spits out this:
>
> Apr 30 08:20:36 bplinux irattach: Starting device irda0
> Apr 30 08:20:36 bplinux irattach: ioctl(SIOCSIFFLAGS): Broken pipe
> Apr 30 08:20:36 bplinux irattach: Stopping device irda0
> Apr 30 08:20:36 bplinux irattach: exiting …
>
> And then dies.  'ifconfig -a' shows the irda0 adapter still, and lsusb is
> showing the correct chip manufacturer / identifying information: Bus 002
> Device 005: ID 9710:7780 MosChip Semiconductor MCS7780 4Mbps Fast IrDA
> Adapter

I'm not sure if ifconfig is supposed to show the irda adapter. Maybe your system 
tries to use the irda adapter as a network interface, and that's why 
libdivecomputer fails to talk to it?

There was a similar report recently (although with another chipset), where the 
irda interface was used by the usbserial (or ir_usb?) module, and I believe 
unloading that made it work. As was already pointed out in one of the other 
replies, you don't need a /dev/ttyUSB0 entry at all.

> But I get no joy trying to import from Subsurface, or from a quick test
> program I wrote to talk directly to libdivecomputer.  This is actually the
> first time in 20 years of using and developing software on Linux that I have
> tried to get IrDA working.  Am I missing something very basic here?  I was
> able to download the dives into SmarTrak in windows so I don't think I have a
> hardware issue, but the adapter is ~6 years old and has had a few accidents,
> perhaps the windows drivers are a bit more forgiving?

When you say downloading works in Windows, was that recently, or long time ago? 
On a real machine, or also in a VM?

Jef