Nortel NTBW50AA Serial Data

[Gandalf_Sr]

I have a Nortel NTBW50AA which I have connected windows 10 to and I use Lady Heather software to see the data.  The (bought) RS232 cable I use claims to be FTDI but the FT_Prog utility doesn't see it and I suspect it's a fake.  If I leave it plugged into the PC, it sends my mouse pointer all over the screen and I have to remember to unplug it.

I've been working up my own design for an RS232 USB-Serial port adapter that uses a Cypress CY7C65213A (FT232 equiv) IC and I have that running at normal logic levels just fine.  I just tried to experiment with a breadboard circuit using the MAX3227E and I have that running fine on a loopback.

However, when I tried to connect to the NTBW50AA with my new setup via the MAX3227E and the CY7C65213A, the data that comes over Teraterm seems like junk and I thought it was going to be in human readable form.

So I looked at the output of the flakey cable that I use with Lady Heather and it shows the same junk on the TeraTerm screen.

Can anyone point me to the format of the data on the NTBW50AA serial port?

[mikerj]

The manual is here.

Have you double checked the comm port is set correctly? 19200, 1 start, 1 stop, 7 bits, odd parity

[Gandalf_Sr]

Thanks but that didn't work.  Lady Heather works fine and says near the top Ser: 0.80611620 COM:10 and the help files for Lady Heather say "The Thunderbolt's communications settings must be configured at its factory default values (9600 baud, 8 data bits, no parity, 1 stop bit)."

So I think that 9600 is correct but I still don't get why I don't see human readable data in TeraTerm, should I be able to see this stuff in readable form?

[texaspyro]

The NTBW can work with a limited set of SCPI-like ASCII commands or with Trimble TSIP format binary commands.  Heather runs it in TSIP mode since those commands provide much more information and configuration options.   The NTBW powers up in SCPI mode.  Sending a BREAK to it switches it to TSIP mode.

As far as the cursor running amok...  this is because if you start Windoze with a device connected to a serial port Windoze usually thinks  that it is a serial mouse.   This has plagued Windoze since at least WIN-95.   There are lots of published ways to stop this from happening...  but NONE of them seem to actually work. 

[Gandalf_Sr]

The NTBW can work with a limited set of SCPI-like ASCII commands or with Trimble TSIP format binary commands.  Heather runs it in TSIP mode since those commands provide much more information and configuration options.   The NTBW powers up in SCPI mode.  Sending a BREAK to it switches it to TSIP mode.

As far as the cursor running amok...  this is because if you start Windoze with a device connected to a serial port Windoze usually thinks  that it is a serial mouse.   This has plagued Windoze since at least WIN-95.   There are lots of published ways to stop this from happening...  but NONE of them seem to actually work.

Thanks.  I've been working on a project where I parse the ASCII string data coming from a GPS and now I'm thinking that a TSIP format would work way better but is Trimble still around?  Is TSIP a standard adopted by other GPS OEMs?

[ArthurDent]

To prevent the psycho mouse you can wait until after Windows boots to connect the GPSDO or go into Win setup and disable the serial mouse. When Windows boots it polls the connected devices and makes a guess as to what the device is. The NTBW50AA and many other devices look like mice.

[texaspyro]

To prevent the psycho mouse you can wait until after Windows boots to connect the GPSDO or go into Win setup and disable the serial mouse.

Disabling the serial mouse does not actually work...  the next time Windoze reboots it gets re-enabled.   Maybe newer version of Windoze has fixed the problem which has been plaguing users for over 30 years... but I still see reports of the problem with Win 10.

[mikerj]

You can disable serial mouse detection by changing a registry setting.