Three bugs, all found by actually running the thing rather than reading it.
1. `--e10` with no value did nothing. Making the flag optional-valued gave it
an empty-string constant, and the code deciding whether to drive the
controller used a truth test - so the documented `--e10` form printed the
full translation and quietly skipped the hardware. No error, because
nothing failed. Now gated on `is not None`, with a comment saying why.
2. A missing part program dumped a traceback. The top-level handler tidied
e10 errors and re-raised everything else. Now a clean message that lists
the part programs it can actually see, which also covers Windows path
confusion.
3. Errors could vanish when piped. stdout is block-buffered and stderr is
not, so the message printed before the output it referred to and a `| tail`
dropped it entirely - looking like a silent failure. stdout is flushed
before writing an error.
Serial access moves behind open_port(), with a termios backend on POSIX and a
Win32 backend reached through ctypes. Deliberately no pyserial: these tools
have to run on locked-down, air-gapped shopfloor machines where installing a
package is a project of its own.
Verified on a real controller from both a Linux laptop and a Windows 11 PC.
Three things that made this harder than it should have been, all now handled:
- CreateFileW returns a HANDLE, which is 64-bit. Without an explicit restype
ctypes truncates it to c_int. The open then appears to succeed and every
read and write silently operates on a bogus handle, which looks exactly
like a dead cable. Every kernel32 call now declares argtypes and restype.
- Defaulting to a fixed COM number was actively harmful. A wrong-but-real
port opens without error and answers nothing, so defaulting to COM3 while
the adapter was on COM4 produced the same silent symptom. Windows now
auto-picks only when exactly one port looks like a USB virtual COM port,
and otherwise refuses and lists what it found.
- COM10 and above need the \\.\ prefix, which is harmless on COM1-9, so it
is always applied.
Adds two diagnostics, because "no response" has too many possible causes to
guess at:
ports every serial port that actually exists. On Windows this reads
SERIALCOMM from the registry, so a port absent here does not exist
now, whatever Device Manager showed last week.
doctor walks the layers - discovery, open, write, read - and reports which
one fails, including a warning when the configured port is an
onboard one while a USB adapter is present.
Port selection is -d, then $E10_PORT, then the safe auto-pick. Friendlier
errors on both platforms for a missing port or a permissions problem.
Groundwork for replacing a Telesis pinstamp with a SIC Marking e10 while
keeping the existing eDNC/MarkTelesis operator workflow. MarkTelesis has a
hardcoded marker-type enum and eDNC is serial-only, so the plan is a
translator that impersonates a Telesis controller on a COM port. These are
the pieces that translator will be built from, all verified against a real
e10 (a P63, firmware "E10 P63 (20140924)").
scripts/e10-client.py
e10-V6 protocol client. Marking path and file transfer both use the BINARY
protocol: the text protocol uses space as its delimiter, so it cannot carry
a field cleared to a single space nor the space runs in real marked text,
and it has no checksum. Includes fault decoding against the manual's fig 1,
and a guard that refuses to overflow a variable's declared buffer.
scripts/make-e10-pattern.py
Builds marking files with DECLARED variables. The controller's own protocol
cannot create one: NEWFILE/INSERTTEXTLINE/SAVEFILE writes the reference but
leaves the variable count at zero, and SETVAR then fails. Template-based,
copying through byte-for-byte everything the format notes do not explain.
scripts/simulate-ednc.py
Parses a part program, substitutes tokens and emits the byte-exact frames
MarkTelesis would send, then translates them for the e10 and can drive one.
The wire format came from disassembling MarkTelesis.exe rather than from a
capture: frame builder at 0x401cf0, and the type letters at their call
sites. Note there is no station ID, unlike the Backup470 dialect.
scripts/fake-telesis.py
Answers as a Telesis controller so MarkTelesis will hold a conversation
long enough to be recorded, with switches to force NAK and timeout paths.
reference/e10/
52-file snapshot off the bench controller, used as the corpus for reversing
the MARK_V5.0 format and for testing without hardware. ConfigCtrl is
excluded and gitignored - it stores the supervisor password in cleartext.
GE part programs are excluded for the same reason.
Three hardware findings worth knowing:
- The controller TRUNCATES SILENTLY to a variable's declared buffer size
while SETVAR still answers ok, and GETVAR echoes the full value back so
it cannot detect this. Guarded client-side against the size in the file.
- It refuses to mark when a referenced variable is unset, which makes an
unset field fail loudly rather than marking the previous part's data.
- Setting variables does not modify the stored file, so backups will not
churn on every marked part.
