Posts made by Jeremy Herbert

I think it would be a very helpful feature to add to IO ninja to just be able to save a log as a raw binary file for each direction. I often have serial port logs that I just want to save to a bin file as-is, and I end up closing IO ninja and just going back to something like CoolTerm which supports this natively.

(it also supports recording directly to a file, in case the computer crashes or powers off during logging)

Also, just to add, the last item in my example is one of these mixed manufacturer devices. It uses the Microchip VID, which was sub licensed to “Herbert Engineering” for use with a SAMD microcontroller. This behaviour is common with USB IC manufacturers (I know at least microchip, ST, FTDI and Silicon Labs do it). To report that this device as manufactured by microchip is probably not correct, as microchip would barely even know that it exists, let alone be able to provide support.

There are also cases where the database is wrong/old, for example the company “Cygnal integrated” was purchased by Silicon labs. Some of their new chips use the Cygnal VID, but set the manufacturer name correctly in the descriptor to “Silicon Labs”. So if you google for this there are lots of posts from confused users as to why this weird device is connected to their system. For example: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38963029/cygnal-integrated-products-serial-port-on-linux

Thank you. The one thing which is important from the USB bus interface info is the interface number. For example, if you have an FT4232 (ie USB to 4x UART) there is no guarantee that UART0 on the device will enumerate as the first device. With the bus info, you can determine which interface you are connecting to. Perhaps if you think it is too much information, it could be hidden behind some sort of configuration option or preference?

In the example I showed, a J-Link has two serial ports, one on interface number 0 and one on interface number 2 (the last digit in the bus info, after the period). Without this info, it is anyones guess as to which port you are really connecting to. It also allows you to see how many interfaces are available for a specific device.

I would also really like to see the device name and serial number shown if possible; right now I have a system with 5x USB to serial converters connected that use the same IC (CP2102N). If the serial number was visible, it would be much easier to connect to the right device (especially after power cycling can randomise the order of the ports).

There are also companies that give out PIDs to use with their chips, so the manufacturer name in the descriptor doesn’t necessarily match the manufacturer name as reported by something like lsusb (which uses a VID lookup database rather than using the descriptor). Not sure if this matters but I thought I should point it out anyway.

Hi,

I am using IO ninja on linux (xubuntu 20.04). When selecting a serial port, the dropdown menu is not as helpful as it could be. Here is what I see:

It isn't really clear from this which port is which. If I am using something like pyserial (for example), I can get a lot more useful information about the ports. For example, the code:

from serial.tools.list_ports import comports

for port in comports():
    print(port.manufacturer, port.description, "-",  port.usb_info())

gives the output (I deleted the real serial numbers):

SEGGER J-Link - CDC - USB VID:PID=1366:1051 SER=XYZ01 LOCATION=2-2.3:1.2
SEGGER J-Link - CDC - USB VID:PID=1366:1051 SER=XYZ01 LOCATION=2-2.3:1.0
Herbert Engineering polyglot-turtle-xiao - polyglot-turtle CDC - USB VID:PID=04D8:EB74 SER=XYZ02 LOCATION=2-2.2:1.0

Is it possible to have IO ninja display some of this extra information about the serial port ?

Thanks,
Jeremy