User`s manual

Software Manual • EKF Intelligent I/O Controller Family On CompactPCI
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EKF Elektronik GmbH * Philipp-Reis-Str. 4 * D-59065 HAMM (Germany)
Tel. [phone] * Fax. [phone] * E-Mail [e-mail] * Internet http://www.ekf.de
Driver Dispatch Functions
The driver supports most of the functionality of the usual Windows NT4/2000 “Serial” device
driver for the serial ports. Standard applications like the “HyperTerminal” are working with the
serial ports on EKF’s Intelligent I/O Controllers without any problem.
When access to serial ports from a command window is required it is to note, that only the
four ports COM1, COM2, COM3 and COM4 are supported by a command shell. Since the
setup procedure configures port numbers on EKF’s Intelligent I/O Controllers starting with
COM11, a renaming of the port’s COM_PORT_NUMBER under the driver registry key is
necessary. See section “
Registry Entries
” for details. Note also, that on many systems
COM1 and COM2 already used for the standard PC serial ports.
The CANbus ports are accessed in the same manner like their serial companions as usual
COM ports, although because of their physical nature some limitations are existent. In most
cases CANbus ports are embedded in proprietary applications written by the user. The static
library “ekf960si1.lib” delivered with the device driver pack (C sources included) contains
basic routines to read or write data via a CANbus port.
Data Structures Used By The Driver
The data structures used by the driver are explained in the following sections. They and their
possibly corresponding definitions can be found in the C header “ntddekf.h” delivered with
the driver installation pack.
SERIAL_CHARS
A structure that contains special characters used for serial ports:
typedef struct _SERIAL_CHARS
{
UCHAR EofChar;
UCHAR ErrorChar;
UCHAR BreakChar;
UCHAR EventChar;
UCHAR XonChar;
UCHAR XoffChar;
} SERIAL_CHARS, *PSERIAL_CHARS;
EofChar:
End Of File character (currently not used).
ErrorChar:
This character, when enabled, is placed in the stream of received characters on error
conditions like buffer overflow, frame errors and so on.