STAR
H
GATE™
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4 CONFIGURING AND TESTING STAR-System™
4.1 STAR-System™
OVERVIEW
Two different layouts are provided depending on the application needs. Each layout
may consist of a single STARGATE™ or a network of several RF base stations.
An RF device is logically linked to only one STARGATE™ RF base station at a time.
In case of a network layout it can choose dynamically the best base station to be
linked to allowing the handover from one cell to another. The routing of data packets
from the application running on the RF device to the application running on the host
PC is managed by the protocol: the designer of the application does not need to
control the STARGATE™ base stations since data transactions are peer to peer
between RF devices and the host PC.
Each STARGATE™ RF base station and each RF device is identified by a unique
address: two RF devices or two base stations cannot have the same address (while
an RF device can have the same address as a base station).
It is necessary to assign the address to the base stations, then, when starting up the
RF protocol on an RF device, you must specify three other addresses:
1. RF device address
2. address of the first base station with which to communicate
3. address of the last base station with which to communicate
The address range for RF devices is from 0 to 1999 while the address setup mode
depends on the device type (see the relevant manual).
The address range for STARGATE™ RF base stations is also from 0 to 1999. In
addition, there is a factory default address whose value is 2000. This means that the
base station needs to be correctly configured before starting to use it. The
STARGATE™ configuration can be also defined by sending commands to the base
station through the PC serial interface specifying the broadcast address: 2047. This
address is very useful to get the configuration from a base station having an
unknown address.
CAUTION
When requesting a base station configuration by using the
broadcast address, only one STARGATE™ must be connected
within the network.
The first and last base station addresses specified on the RF device must have the
same value whenever a layout is composed of a single STARGATE™.
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