Hi Bruce,
Frist a bit of background.
We have been using Sun Ray's in our Point of Sale application for a
number of years and have learned through trail and error what works
and what doesn't. Recently, we installed our system at a new
customer, replacing PC's used as Point of Sale Cash Registers with
our Sun Ray based solution. For sales receipt printers we have been
using Star TSP-600 series printers connected to Sun Ray 2's (USB
interface). However this customer had several perfectly good Epson
TM-88 series printers (parallel interface) that we didn't
necessarily want to scrap. So we purchased a couple different USB
to parallel adapters to see if we could support their existing Epson
printers. These were a Radio Shack Gigaware model ($36 yikes) and
one from Sabrent ($10 nice). Both adapters were recognized and
nodes were created in the /tmp/SUNWut/units/.../dev directory.
Voila! We could print the Epson printers using either adapter.
Unfortuately, we discovered later that there were data
communications issues, resulting data loss, with the Sabrent
adapters and ultimatley replaced them all with the Radio Shack
model. The Radio Shack adapter solution has been working well for a
few weeks now.
Where would the world be without Radio Shack (or Tandy for our friends
outside the USA)?
Today's situation.
We came upon an opportunity to support existing RS-232 connected
customer display poles. Unfortunatley we are already using the Sun
Ray RS-232 port as a control interface to a credit/debit card
terminal. But, given our success with the USB to parallel adapter
solution we decided to try a USB to serial adapter. Thiinking that
this would be a pretty generic situation, we went to Fry's grabbed
an adapter off the rack. Back at the lab, we connected the adapter
and ... nothing, no node in the dev directory. Now, in retrospect,
I know I should have checked the HCL. Which I have done and
subsequently ordered a Keyspan USA-19HS to try.
OK.
The actual questions.
Followed by The Actual Answers ;-) - I hope you like at least some of
them!
When a USB device is plugged in to a Sun Ray and not recognized is
there anything we can do to talk to it?
No.
In the big scheme of things, are there docs on how Sun Ray does USB
peripheral recognition and creates nodes or how to write routines to
talk to unsupported devices?
In general, you can use libusb if you want to write your own driver
for a USB device. libusb is supported on Sun Ray, Solaris and also
various Linux and other UNIX flavors, so the code should be fairly
portable between environments.
In terms of devices that look like serial ports, we don't have a public
API/SPI for adding new serial drivers to our framework, however that
is something that we are looking at providing in the future for just
such
cases as yours. We are also considering providing a CDC (USB
Communications Device Class) driver to handle the increasing number
of devices that are implementing the CDC spec.
mike
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