drvAscii README

drvAscii.tar.gz contains the device and driver support for records interfaced 
to a remote device which communicates with ascii strings over a serial link.
This driver must be layered on top of the serial driver written by Jhill for 
the Keck Observatory.

The driver supports bi, bo, mbbi, mbbo, ai, ao, longin, longout, stringin, 
stringout, mbbi direct, mbbo direct, and waveform (long stringin) records. 
The mechanism for determining how to convert to/from strings and record vals 
is embedded in the records' PARM fields (inp and out).

Special parm field tags (special records)  allow control over certain comms 
features such as command terminators (carriage-return linefeed by default).
Unfortunately an anomoly exists with respect to the write and read command
terminators. Ideally one would want to set a specific stringout record's 
PINI=YES and sets its initial val field to the desired command terminator(s) 
(eg. '\r'), such that on record init the desired terminator(s) would be in 
effect. The problem is that e2sr strips off all backslashes.

When implementing the driver I thought the best approach was to treat the val 
strings as 'C' strings which may have character and numeric escape codes 
embedded. I think any other solution is wrong. In any event, one can use 
backslashes with dbpf (eg. '\r') and triple backslashes with caput 
(eg. '\\\r') so... the desired command terminators can be setup after record 
init with a script.  

The documentation, such as it is, is simply the headers of the .c files.

I have included a test database which contains at least one record of each 
type and, in most cases, a faulty record of each type. The test database
connects all records to the vxworks '\tyCo\1' device. To experiment with 
the driver you must connect transmit to receive of the serial port associated 
with said device (ie. the database is setup so that it appears as though the
remote device simply echoes).

One must obtain the serial driver -sioSup.tar.gz- 

drvAscii.tar.gz contains the following files:
         devAscii.c
         drvAscii.c
         drvAscii.h
         devSup.ascii
         drvSup.ascii
         drvAscii.sch
	 drvAscii.db
         drvAscii.README
         Makefile
         Makefile.Vx

Any suggestions, improvements, or fixes please contacted Allan Honey at
ahoney@keck.hawaii.edu