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CHAPTER 5: Operation
5.9 RS-232 Control
There is yet one more way to select channels on the ServSwitch Wizard: through its
RS-232 serial port. (This is a proprietarily pinned DB15 connector; see
Section A.3
of the
Appendix
for more information.) This connector serves more often as the
attachment point for the Wizard’s optional Remote-Control Module, but by using
an adapter you can connect a different RS-232 device to it. To select a channel
through this port, the data rate and format of the sending device must be set to
1200 bps, 8 data bits, no parity, and 1 stop bit. No handshaking (flow control) is
used by the ServSwitch Wizard.
Simply send the ASCII character for the channel which needs to be selected:
ASCII “1” (31 hex, 49 decimal) will select channel 1, ASCII “2” (32 hex,
50 decimal) will select channel 2, and so on. The Wizard will echo this character
back to the sending device when the channel has been changed. At the time of this
writing, this method is best used to switch channels on single Wizards; switching
synchronized Wizards would require carefully pinned special cabling, and
switching cascaded Wizards isn’t possible.
5.10 Operating Cascaded ServSwitch Wizards
As described in
Section 3.3.2
, multiple ServSwitch Wizards can be cascaded
together. To select channels in cascaded systems, you will need to send hotkey
commands from the master Wizard’s attached keyboard (see the “{Hotkeys} +
{Channel Address}” paragraph in
Section 5.5
).
For an example of hotkey switching, consider a situation in which two ServSwitch
Wizards are connected together as shown in Figure 5-4 on the next page. To select
the computer attached to port 1 on the subsidiary ServSwitch Wizard, you would
press and hold down the hotkeys, then press and release “3,” press and release “1,”
and finally release the hotkeys. This causes the master Wizard to switch to its port
3, to which the subsidiary Wizard is attached, and send the subsidiary Wizard the
command to switch to port 1, to which your desired computer is attached. (If there
were any 12- or 16-port ServSwitch Duos in the system, you would have to use two
digits to designate each port, inserting a leading zero when necessary.)
Two more examples, assuming that the hotkeys are the default combination of
[Ctrl] + [Alt]:
•
To switch to channel 4 of a 4-port subsidiary Wizard attached to channel 1 of your 4-port
master Wizard:
Press and hold [Ctrl] + [Alt], press and release [1], press and release [4],
release [Ctrl] + [Alt].
Summary of Contents for ServSwitch Wizard SW651A
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