User's Manual

UK Timecode Systems Ltd. Unit 6, Elgar Business Centre, Moseley Road, Hallow, Worcester.
WR26NJ. UK
The statuses are only updated around twice per second maximum. So this command
should only be used infrequently.
Initial Connect – Static Data
BLSS? Returns a bitmap of known BLink devices on the network.
The bitmap is broken down into 32-bit hexadecimal values that represent a bitmap of
which slave devices are active. If say there is the reply BLST=0000005B if now the
reply is broken into binary, each bit represents a device present or not (1 or 0). Thus,
the hex value of 0000005B breaks down to binary 0...0001011011 and shows there
are 5 bits set, thus there are currently 5 devices online, also the bits that are set
gives a representation of active devices where bit 0 represents device 1, bit 1
represents device 2, and so on. In this instance devices 1, 2, 4, 5, & 7 are all active.
Each bitmap number represents 32 devices so additional values in the reply
represents the bitmap of devices 33 through to 64 and so on.
The BLSS Command must be used direct to the connected master device.
Addressing a slave device such as #@3:BLSS? will return nothing.
BLSS=n Returns the slave device’s static data, where n is the index into the
table of stored devices.
The statuses will be returned as an ASCII string with each status comma delimited
on each line. The status’ to be returned will be:-
1. Blink ID
2. Unique ID (32bit Hexadecimal)
3. Unit Type
4. Unit Device Type Name
5. Firmware Revision * 100
6. FPGA Revision * 100
7. Ext Revision * 100
8. S1C Revision
9. Device Capability Flags (See appendix)
The device capability flags will let the Hub know what functions can be used with the
device, such as if a display is fitted, has Wifi capability, or external Sync port etc. It is
proposed to use a 32bit hexadecimal number.
A typical return from this request will be:-
BLSS=1,12ABCD78,11,UltraSyncBLU,201,106,0,5, E0F07040<LF>
There could be confusion when parsing the returned values from the above two
requests as they both return “BLSS=<reply>”. To differentiate between the two the
length of the first <reply> field will determine which request the reply was from. If the
first field has a length of 8 characters is can be determined that the reply is for the
“BLSS?” query, otherwise it is a reply to the “BLSS=n” query.