Lallafa’s Blog

dtv2ser Homepage

Summary

dtv2ser is a small hardware device that bridges TLR’s dtvtrans protocol used to communicate with a DTV via a RS232 interface to your Mac or PC. By using a serial-to-USB adapter the dtv2ser provides dtvtrans access for all modern PCs where the original dtvtrans parallel cable cannot be used. The new dtv2ser+usb board directly integrates the USB adapter and realizes the full dtv2ser functionality on a USB-stick-like device (see picture above).

The data flow is as follows:

DTV <--dtvtrans--> dtv2ser <--RS232--> USB2Serial <--USB--> Mac/PC

Features

The dtv2ser package currently consists of the following parts:

1. Hardware
   • two schematics: a minimal ATmega8 board with MAX232A based RS232 connection and ATmega8 USB-Stick board with FT 232 RL based USB-to-serial chip
   • running at 14.54760 MHz
   • 3 LEDs for Status: “Ready”, “Transmit”, “Error”
   • wiring for the dtvtrans DB-9 joystick connector
2. dtv2ser Server Firmware
   • full dtvtrans command set
   • a full featured firmware with rich command set
   • full description of the dtv2ser serial protocol
   • high speed UART serial transfer 115.2 kbps up to 230.4 kbps
   • hardware RTS/CTS handshaking, 8 bit data, parity none, 1 stop bit
   • config parameters settable during runtime and storable in EEPROM
   • includes AVR bootloader that allows to upgrad the firmware directly via serial and without an ISP
3. dtv2sertrans Client Tool
   • dtv2sertrans command line tool (similar to original dtvtrans tool)
   • python module for dtv2ser communication
   • portable: runs on Mac, Linux and Windows
   • requires PySerial

Download

• Version 0.4 – 28.9.2008: dtv2ser-0.4.zip
  • size: 1120051
  • md5: 4b8b372d5d078a91c86649d49f4753ee
  • added full dtvtrans 1.0 support (load, save, run, init)
  • added full flash support (sync, dump, map, program, erase, …)
• Version 0.3 – 3.3.2008: dtv2ser-0.3.zip
  • size: 1060708
  • md5: 71c2cba9a53df4d7e521ee7dc1f7e545
  • added fast transfer for dtvtrans 1.0
  • added AutoType and JoyStream
  • added fully automatic bootstrap for mini-modded DTV
• Version 0.2 – 29.11.2007: dtv2ser-0.2.zip
  • size: 1020063
  • md5: fa151986e1ea142c4c07d340c6364720
  • added dtv2ser+usb device schematic and board
  • added ‘boot’ command
  • added serial bootloader for AVR
• Version 0.1 – 11.09.2007: dtv2ser-0.1.zip
  • size: 362418
  • md5: 984ca9c048ae1a6d3c2707d42754e32d
  • initial public release

The archive contains all GPL’ed source code for the dtv2ser server firmware, pre-compiled firmware, the Mac/PC client written in Python (running on Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows), and the schematic for the Hardware.

Details

• dtv2ser Hardware: Details on the hardware implementation including schematics and prototype snapshots
• dtv2ser Software: How to use the client side software of dtv2ser
• dtv2ser Video Gallery: See dtv2ser in action!

Gallery

My dtv2ser connected to my modded DTV (blue case) and attached to my Keyspan USA-HS19 USB-to-Serial adapter.

My development setup: MacBook Pro (left) connected via dtv2ser to my DTV (blue box).

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