I am doing some embedded systems development work and I have an FTDI USB to Serial bridge chip on the board I am working on. It randomly drops received bytes. This only happens under Arch linux as I just recently switched from Ubuntu and I had no problems there. I have the same problem on another computer I use that also runs Arch, though the problem there is much worse. I'm assuming it's a kernel interrupt priority issue. I don't really know where to start debugging this, so any input would be much appreciated. Unfortunately, it's quite random. Sometimes it's rock solid and sometimes it drops a byte every few hundred or so, causing some rather anoying issues. Cast in point: it seems to be working fine at the moment but earlier it was wreaking havoc while I was tring to carry out some calibration operations. The other computer I tried it with is consistently bad, though, getting out of sync almost immediately. The first computer (usually good performance) has a high end 2nd gen core i7 (sandy bridge) while the second (not so good performance) computer has an intel atom processor.
Last edited by alex.forencich (2011-09-01 07:07:02)
The inverter reads/writes binary data, and I've figured out how to handle that via od and awk. First question is of course if the serial port is configured correctly at works at all. I got a similar situation in reading binary data with my embedded Linux environment. In the other times there are fill bytes send.