collapseos/tools/README.md

Tools

This folder contains tools to communicate to Collapse OS machines from a modern environment or to manipulate a blkfs.

Communication tools all take a device path as a first argument. That device is the serial device that connects you to your machine. It's often a USB-to-TTL dongle. When - is specified, stdin is used as the device.

Note that for these tools to work well, you need the serial device to be properly set up, TTY-wise. You'll probably want to do that with stty. The tool itself takes care of setting the regular stuff (cs8, -parenb, etc), but you need to set the speed. Here's an example working on OpenBSD:

$ ( stty 115200 raw ; sleep 2 ; ./upload - a000 os.bin ) <> /dev/cuaU0

To be honest, I'm having a bit of troubles making these tools work as well on OpenBSD as they do in Linux. But it does work. Here are some advices:

• Use cuaXX instead of ttyXX.
• Run cu -l /dev/cuaXX before running your tool and run a dummy command to make sure that the output buffer is flushed.
• Use the "raw" option to avoid TTY-processing options to mess with data.
• If you experience random failures in your command, try inserting a "sleep 2" between your "stty" invocation and the command. In my experience, these tend to help.

On Linux, it's generally easier:

• Run screen on the device (often /dev/ttyUSBX)
• Quit with CTRL+A :quit
• Run the tool on the same device