RelaisControl

This module supports access to a Conrad RelaisCard. Conrad is a large german electronic stuff dealer. They are selling a self manufactured card with 8 relais on it. The card is accessed via serial communication. The card is also cascadeable up to 255 cards in a ring.

While the task of accessing such a card is very simple this distribution contains 3 module files. These are the abstraction of the whole cascade, the card and the communcation.

Frame.pm contains the protocol which is used to talk to the card. RelaisCard.pm is the owner of one single card. RelaisControl.pm is the container for an arbitrary number of cards.

For simple tasks you only need the RelaisControl module. It allows direct access to any port on any card.

THINGS TO KNOW

At the moment I don't have a card to test further things. If there are important issues to resolve I will get me one :)
I was never able to test the cascading stuff. The things implemented for using multiple cards are just programmed as they are documented.
There are still things hardcoded while they aren't supposed to. This includes the location of the lockfile for the serial port and the port speed settings. It defaults to 19200,8,n,1 without any handshake or flowcontrol. I'm not quite sure if the card is operating on any other setting.

CAUTION

The card is very dump when it comes to communication. If the card goes out of acknowledged communication there is no way to reinitialize the card and gain control again. This is very problematic if you have electronics that should only switched up to a few seconds. If something goes wrong after you closed the circuit and before opening again your circuit will stay closed. The only possible action to force the card to open a circuit is to take away the power supply :(

INSTALLATION

To install this module type the following:

perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install

DEPENDENCIES

This module requires these other modules and libraries:

Device::SerialPort

CONTACT

If you found a bug or have any question about the module you may contact me at noha@cpan.org

COPYRIGHT AND LICENCE

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

Credits

Thanks for reporting bugs and asking questions go to:

Ullrich Wuerfel