this is about serial communication with the "LED controller" from HighEndSystems
the controller is a device from the earlier 1990s to control Intellabeam Scanners
it has a 25pin RS232 serial port to backup data and do some more control
prepare
1st make sure to configure your serial port
look if it is set up correctly in your BIOS and operating system
serial settings: 9600 8N1, no flow control
for Win98 users: interrupt the startup of the graphical system by pressing F8 and chose "command line" to boot into DOS
backup / restore
on the HES ftp server there is a program to be found "lwbackup.exe" here
It is quite easy to handle and is used to transfer the whole memory content between the controller and the PC. Besides that you can use any ascii serial file transfer or terminal software.
The controller has half a MB of internal memory, the transfer speed is 9600Baud and takes about 15 minutes (remember this is technology from 1990). Being an old DOS program "lwbackup" can't handle long file names, even more it does not work with abbreviated path names using the "~", so be sure to have a folder on your HDD with no more than 8 characters and do not use filenames with more than 8 characters!
Put the controller into Standby mode, press and hold the Record button until the LED display reads "SA..." - in that very moment either "lwbackup" should recognize the controller or your terminal should show you a message explaining, what to do.
for linux users
minicom is a good starting point, the serial port is called ttyS0
to transfer use this command: ascii-xfer -renv
accessing presets
There is another program to access more than the 24 presets available from the front panel. It is called "lcc".
If desired put the controller into "binary access mode" - look up the manual about that - dip-switch 3 and 5 on, reboot. In "lcc" create at least one cue with the desired preset number. When assigning pages to presets, right after pressing "Select" on the controller sent the play command for the desired cue through "lcc": move the cursor line on the cue and press Enter. Now you have stored a preset with that number (up to 1024?), it might be only recalled by "lcc" though.
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