Controlling Philips BDM4065 monitor via RS232

thestormdragon

I think so - I've only got one monitor on one serial port.

I look forward to hearing how you get on - the additional tech stuff that Philips sent me is still on my website Index of /monitor

Fma965

OK will keep you updated, Already grabbed those files

Fma965

Hi have you tried sending 0501A200A6 (should get platform and version number)

Fma965

Well i got my cable but i didn't realise they are both female ends so am ordering a male to male adapter which will be here tomorrow.

Fma965

OK just tried this, used PuTTY, Echo, RealTerm but nothing worked... How did you contact philips?

thestormdragon

Hi

Sorry for the slow reply - I didn't get a notification of your updates to this thread.

I'm "glad" yours doesn't work as well - at least it's not just me (mine).  

I've emailed Philips but haven't had any reply to my last 3 "please can you tell me what's happening" emails.  My last contact from them was October 1st.

The email addresses I've been using are:

[email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected];[email protected]; [email protected];[email protected]; [email protected]

I'd be very interested to hear if you get any response.

Kind regards

David

thestormdragon

Hi

I've just had a reply from another person at Philips ([email protected]) saying

"I tested and met the same problem with RS232 no function.
And  now , I am forwarding it to QE and RD. Maybe  I will get result next Monday and I will update then."

I'll let you know if I hear anything further.

Cheers

David

cb831

Hmmm, the documentation kind of sucks, but I solved it on my monitor at least.

The .doc file states that you should send
so the get version should be

05 01 A2 00 A6 which returns nothing

however if you study the .xls file it appears that you have to send a header of


It turns out that all commands have the header A6 01 00 00 00 and hence the version command should be A6 01 00 00 00 05 01 A2 00 A6. For this command the monitor returns nothing either. Padding a byte 00 to the end makes the monitor respond with
21 01 00 00 04 01 00 01 24
from the second last byte I see that there is a packet length mismatch error and scrutinizing the reply I notice that the length field is not including the checksum (as stated in the .doc file) and that why I had to pad a byte to get an answer at all. Also the checksum spans the full package. With that in mind I send
A6 01 00 00 00 04 01 A2 00 00
and get the reply
21 01 00 00 0A 01 A2 46 57 3A 31 2E 30 31 BC
where the data part translate into 'FW:1.0' in ascii

Trying Get Source A6 01 00 00 00 03 01 AD 08 returns 21 01 00 00 05 01 AD FD 04 70 where FD 04 nicely indicate that my source is DisplayPort

From what you've written above it seems that you send the ascii string A6010000.. using putty etc, however you should send the binary representation of A6 01 00 etc as bytes over the serial channel which is hard without some programming!!

Hope this helps...

Claus

thestormdragon

Hi Claus

Thanks for your input - I'm glad that you've got something working.

I understand your comment about ASCII vs the binary representation but could you please supply an example?

e.g. "Trying Get Source A6 01 00 00 00 03 01 AD 08" equates to 011001110110111001 (or something)

Even better would be a website or guide as to how you convert A6 01 00 00 00 03 01 AD 08 to 011001110110111001 (or do you use some automation software (e.g. Homeseer) or?)

Many thanks in advance

David

cb831

It means that if the hex representation is 41 42 43 31 32 33 you should really send these values on the RS232 meaning that ABC123 would be transferred (41 maps to A etc.)
See eg. Ascii Table - ASCII character codes and html, octal, hex and decimal chart conversion but be aware that for values above 0x80 the mapping to viewable characters is depending on regional settings on your machine.

The best would be if you could write a small program that would take the hex string as input and write the binaries to the serial line. In C# etc you could write something like

byte[] SwitchToDP = {0xA6, 0x01, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x07, 0x01, 0xAC, 0x09, 0x04, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00};
SerialPort _serialPort =new SerialPort()
{
PortName = "COM2",
Handshake =Handshake.None,
RtsEnable =true,
DtrEnable =false,
NewLine ="\r\n",
StopBits =StopBits.One,
Parity =Parity.None,
DataBits =8,
BaudRate = 9600,
ReadTimeout =2000,
ReadBufferSize =10240
};
_serialPort.Write(SwitchToDP,0,SwitchToDP.Length);
_serialPort.Close();

Claus