Re: Dectalk USB Parameters

[Janina Sajka <janina rednote net>]

Jason's point is on target. But there's another aspect as well. We must
insure that we can regain control of the device quickly. That requires
two things:

*	A means to return the device to sanity quickly and
*	reliably--power cycle is certainly an acceptable method.

*	An equally reliably means to insure the serial port on the
*	computer is just as easily restored to sanity, and particularly
*	that it stops pumping out spurious data. This is a little
*	harder.

It seems to me this discussion has exposed requirements for our Free
Standards activity. I guess I need to find the head of this thread in
the archive and pass it on.

Jason White writes:
> Peter Korn writes:
>  > 
>  > The point I was trying to make is that in an ideal world a serial synthesizer 
>  > wouldn't be vulnerable to being "killed" by any stream of bytes sent to it. 
>  > In a separate thread Mario noted that some serial synthesizers support 
>  > firmware upgrades via the serial port; perhaps that is what happened here (and 
>  > when I wrote in this thread yesterday, I had forgotten about this feature).
> 
> >From subsequent posts it appears this is what happened. The device
> manufacturer should make it very difficult to enter this mode however.
> For example, according to the documentation of my INKA braille
> display, to overwrite the flash memory you have to send out a packet
> containing a command, the blocks of data and a check sum, which is not
> likely to happen by accident (unless you're debugging braille display
> software that uses the INKA packet protocol and transmits spurious
> commands, perhaps).
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-- 

Janina Sajka				Phone: +1.202.494.7040
Partner, Capital Accessibility LLC	http://www.CapitalAccessibility.Com

Chair, Accessibility Workgroup		Free Standards Group (FSG)
janina freestandards org		http://a11y.org

If Linux can't solve your computing problem, you need a different problem.