Serial Communication Plugin - loosing settings

The serial communication plugin will often lose all requests/ responses if the serial port is disconnected while Dewesoft is running. Dewesoft most of the time will not delete the information, and will often no show an issue, until the file is closed and reopen which means if its not caught could loose quite a bit of work. Hard to really show this as an example, because the serial plugin information is either there or not. The information under extensions never gets deleted.

Gary

Dear Gary,

when creating and setting everything up, did you save the setup?

These settings are saved in the setup file, so if the error occurs you simply reload the setup file.

Best regards.

Rok

They get deleted from the setup file if Dewesoft partially crashes which is often when making changes to the serial settings. The information box in the upper right corner sometimes will show an error sometimes not. The request will still show in the software, but all traffic stops. Even if the setup file is not saved the information will be gone. Only had this happen on the my build laptop that uses a usb to serial converter, on the production machine it has pcie to serial, so has a solid connection. It will delete all settings for all com ports, The information store in the .dxp file remains intact. I will see if can get a screen shot of the error.

Dear Gary,

I'm sorry it took some time, but I finally figured it out. I couldn't reproduce the issue in simulation mode, but I was lucky because we got a real system for testing here in the office and I got a chance to look into this issue.

I was able to reproduce the issues that you are having and can confirm that when the communication is lost the values from serial-com just freezes and do not start reading again if the connection is established back again. Also, there are no warnings reported.

You can check if the samples are coming into Dewesoft by using the Ctrl+Shift+I to open the channel info window. You will need to select the channel which you want to observe:

When the interruption occurs the Direct buffer stops counting.

I also could reproduce the issue with Serial com losing requests and responses in the settings menu.

Both issues were reported to the developers. We will notify you when there is an update on this error.

Best Regards.

Rok

Dear Gary,

I have discussed this issue with the developers and they notified me that if the disconnection happens on the USB converter is a different issue and will be very difficult to detect to generate a disconnection warning. If the USB connection fails the whole COM port driver is shut down.

In this case, the “Serial COM connection” is not really being disconnected, but the USB device disconnects, which is a converter → this means that the “Serial COM port” is removed during acquisition and then connected back again.

In your previous post, you stated: Only had this happen on the my build laptop that uses a usb to serial converter, on the production machine it has pcie to serial, so has a solid connection. 

Can you confirm that this issue happens only on the USB converter?

Best Regards.

Rok

I had this happen last Friday on the production machine with pcie serial. I was not operating the machine so did not see what happened. Of course in the case the Sirius unit actually locked up, all digital outputs went high and the unit had to be unplugged from power for it to reset. Just rebooting the PC, did not help. In this case two of the three serial channels were deleted from the serial plugin after restarting Dewesoft, but all serial settings will still existed in the options settings, extensions location. So clearly it can happen do to other reasons other than a usb disconnect unknown what happend in this case.

Dear Gary,

Thank you for additional information. We have passed the information to the development team. We will keep you posted about the progress.

Dear Gary,

The developers have come up with an idea of how to solve this issue.

Can you confirm that the values are arriving constantly and are present all the time?

In this case “heartbeat” can be done to “alarm” that data is lost.

Is the expected behaviour that there is a notice when the data is gone?

Will this solution be useful for you?

Data does not stop transmitting, there is no indication that something has broken until after you exit the program and then come back into Dewesoft and the serial channels have been deleted. So there is nothing to alarm on.

Dear Gary,

In order to proceed, we would kindly ask you to demonstrate this issue through the use of Team Viewer. Or please make a screen recording of the issue.

What kind of error do you get from time to time? Is the one with the disappearing channels or is it a different one?

We need to see how are the channels deleted. If the setup is saved, it cannot be deleted. If the application has crashed and the setup was not saved, then it is logical that the settings are lost. The question is why the application stops working.

For a better understanding of the problem, we would need this additional information about it in order to find the best solution.

I havent had this issue repeat in quite some time and per previous comments, dewesoft was able to duplicate at least part of this issue remotely so I am not going to spend additional effort to try to duplicate.

Dear Gary,

we have tested a Serial COM to USB converter with an encoder sensor to find out how the plugin behaves.

If the sensor is disconnected while storing the data there is no warning message, but the data is collected normally when the sensor is connected back again. The data stream continues and no channels or settings are lost in the setup file.

Per the conversation above this was only occurring very few times and only if the usb to serial physical connection was loose. I am not actively trying to solve this issue as I don’t use usb adapters on the production work.