Suppress MegaBASIC Header

Hello,

I have an IC693PCM301 and I want to write a program to use both serial ports to talk to a device. Everything is fine except when the PCM starts up Serial Port #1 outputs the MegaBASIC header which will cause problems with the deivce attached to the port.

Is there anyway to suppress this header from being transmitted.

Thanks.

I can't say for sure because I've never had to suppress it. Here are a couple of things to check if you haven't already.

I believe that a power cycle is treated the same as a 'soft reset' which is the same thing as pressing the reset button on the module for less than ten seconds. Following a soft reset, the module launches the default application program, which is normally named BASIC.pgm. If BASIC.pgm takes immediate control of both ports, the module may not transmit the Megabasic header. If there is no BASIC.pgm present on the module, a soft reset is treated the same as a hard reset.

You would still use the 'hard reset' to revert Port 1 back to programming mode.

There are also some COMREQ or SVCREQ instructions associated with the PCM module. Perhaps one of them could be used.

Would the external device still have problems if the baud rate or parity was wrong? If it can handle a parameter mismatch, try setting the default values of the PCM ports to something other than what the external device is expecting. Let it boot up and send the header at the wrong baud rate, then use the IOCTL command in Megabasic to change the port parameters to the correct values.

From the GE forums I got this response from HerdBoy.

"You need to redirect the standard IO channel to the NULL: device (default is COM1: device). So create a PCMEXEC.BAT file with a line like the following and load to the PCM

R BASIC.EXE app.PGM >NULL: <NULL: ?NULL

where app is the name of your application.

This file can be created with any ASCII editor. Load to the PCM along with your application program.

hope this helps."

Then

"forgot a : at the end, should look like

R BASIC.EXE app.PGM >NULL: <NULL: ?NULL:"

http://gefanuc.bnsi.net/eforum/showthread.php?p=24614&posted=1#post24614

Works perfectly. Thanks for your response Steve that should normally work by changing partity and having the device drop all of the characters but our device here doesn't check parity.