Telesis pinstamp controllers have never been backed up. The vendor's own
utilities, Backup470 and Backup420, are GUIs with no command line, so nothing
could capture a marker on a schedule - and a controller swap meant retyping
patterns from memory.
TelesisMarker.psm1 speaks the protocol directly, reversed from a capture of
Backup470 against a TMC470 and verified against hardware: a pattern pulled by
this code is byte-identical to the one the vendor tool saves, and a pattern
written back survives a power cycle. A TMC420 was captured the same way and
differs in exactly one respect - it exposes no parameter files - so one
implementation covers both families, with content classes chosen from a Type I
status probe rather than a per-model dialect.
Backup-PartMarker.ps1 captures everything the controller holds into a
timestamped snapshot on the share and records it in ShopDB against the marker
asset. Snapshots rather than a mirrored directory, because a mirror forces a
choice between deleting the only copy of a retired pattern and claiming a
pattern that no longer exists; a snapshot has neither problem, and the manifest
hash means an unchanged controller writes nothing.
The marker's serial port is shared with eDNC and is exclusive-open, so captures
happen only at shift changes - 14:00 normally, when someone is on site to fix a
problem, with 06:00 and 22:00 engaging only once the backup is overdue. The
capture yields the port within a second if the marker application starts
mid-run, and cycles missed to a busy port are counted and carried into the next
snapshot, since posting a no-op to keep the health badge green would hide
exactly the failure the badge exists to report.
TYPE 'R' deletes a file on the controller, immediately and without
confirmation. It is documented in the module header and deliberately not
implemented.