Communicating between boards

[jsureke]

Hi,
I have three (soon to be four) Teensy 3.5 boards configured as XPlane FlightSim devices, and I need someone to point me in the right direction to talk between the boards. They all show up in Arduino as the same Teensy port number which I've already posted about, so I'm at a loss as to how to go about making one board tell something to another board.
If there is a way to create custom DataRefs in the XPlane interface, that would make it easy, but I haven't found that anywhere.
Any ideas out there?
Thanks,
John

[TeensyWolf]

Hi,
I have three (soon to be four) Teensy 3.5 boards configured as XPlane FlightSim devices, and I need someone to point me in the right direction to talk between the boards. They all show up in Arduino as the same Teensy port number which I've already posted about, so I'm at a loss as to how to go about making one board tell something to another board.
If there is a way to create custom DataRefs in the XPlane interface, that would make it easy, but I haven't found that anywhere.
Any ideas out there?
Thanks,
John

I don’t think USB would work, as it talks to boot loader. Simplist is connect UART TX board 1 to UART RX of the other and vice versa.

[jsureke]

I don’t think USB would work, as it talks to boot loader. Simplist is connect UART TX board 1 to UART RX of the other and vice versa.

I don't know what that means. Are you talking about using the TX / RX pins? Is there example code somewhere?

[el_supremo]

Which version of Windows are you using?

Pete

[jsureke]

Which version of Windows are you using?

Pete

Windows 10 Pro

[el_supremo]

I had lots of problems with duplicate COM ports while I was using Win 7, but since I've switched to Win 10 Pro I haven't had any more trouble at all.
When you are programming the three T3.5 boards, do you do them all from the same instance of the IDE? i.e. program one of them, unplug it and program the next, etc.? That seems to be the root cause of the duplicate COM ports I observed in Win 7. To fix it, I start a new copy of the IDE to talk to each board.
But you'll have to get rid of those duplicate ports. When I had the problem in Win 7, I used Device Manager to uninstall all three COM ports (including removing the driver). Reboot. Then plug one board in and start one copy of the IDE for it, setting Tools: Board and Port as appropriate. Then plug in the next board and repeat the process with a new copy of the IDE. When you plug in each board, especially the first, give the system time to see the board and find and install the driver - in theory, it should assign a different COM port to each board.
Use at your own risk, but it worked for me. Good luck.

Pete

[jsureke]

I had lots of problems with duplicate COM ports...
Pete

These are not showing up as COM ports. They show up as Teensy ports:

[el_supremo]

Use device manager to look at your COM ports, including hidden ones (View:Show Hidden Devices).

Pete

[jsureke]

Use device manager to look at your COM ports, including hidden ones (View:Show Hidden Devices).

Pete

Wow! That explains a lot... One third party device was registered under several com ports. My flight yoke was under HID something like 12 times.

[el_supremo]

Yup. The trick is figuring out how to safely clean it up!

Pete