Windows IoT + Pi3

Hi everyone, I'm looking to use the RS485 Pi card on a Raspberry Pi 3 with a program running under Windows IoT.

I was originally using this card: Link to competitor (hope that's OK) however, I found them to be a little unreliable and was hoping to use the AB Electronics UK card instead. Unfortunately, I can't get the card to work. The 'competitor' card linked above works perfectly, serial data is fine but with the AB card I can't get any comms at all. I'm putting this down to the Pi 3 issues discussed here: /kb/article/1035/serial-port-setup-in-raspberry-pi-os It seems the solution to this problem always discusses the changes required for Linux builds.

Ultimately, I have 3 questions:

1. Has anyone had any success with these boards using a Raspberry Pi 3 running Windows IoT?

2. Does anyone know of a way to apply the 'Linux fixes' linked above to Windows IoT?

3. Does AB Electronics have any plans to revise the board so it becomes compatible (out of the box) for Pi 3s (as per the 485 competitor board linked above)?

Many thanks in advance.

Regards, PSEnviro.

P.S. Apologies in advance if discussing other Pi card vendors isn't allowed.

Hi

We have not tried using the RS485 Pi with Windows 10 on a Raspberry Pi 3 yet but I am currently setting up a fresh IOT image on a Pi 3 so I can check whether or not it works. In theory, as long as the UART pins are working on the Raspberry Pi then the RS485 Pi should work as well.

The schematic for the LinkSprite board is similar to our RS485 Pi board so if the LinkSprite board works ours should too. Comparing the two boards the main differences apart from using a different RS485 transceiver is their board has LEDs to show when data is being sent and received and our board has voltage spike protection on the inputs. The wiring on the DB9 connectors is different so if you are using a cable designed for the LinkSprite board you will need to rewire it to use our RS485 board.

I will let you know if I manage to get Windows 10 working with the RS485 Pi.

Hi Andrew,Thanks for your reply, much appreciated.I will await your response.

Sorry for the delay. I have managed to get a Raspberry Pi 3 running Windows IoT to work with the RS485 Pi. I set up a fresh image of IoT and used a modified version of the SerialUART demo from Microsoft so I could send a receive data over the UART port. I have uploaded the modified version to our GitHub testscripts folder so you can try it on your Raspberry Pi. I basically stripped out all of the code which allows you to select a UART port in the GUI and hard-coded it to work on the Raspberry Pi UART port with a baud rate of 115200.

The RS485 Pi was connected to another RS485 Pi on a Raspberry Pi 2 running Linux which is configured to use the UART port as a terminal. When I started the SerialUART app and then powered up the second Raspberry Pi I received the normal Linux bootup text in the received data box on the Windows app and once booted I could send data to the second Raspberry Pi from the app and have it echo the text back so two-way communication appears to be working.

Can you try downloading the modified SerialUART app and see if it works on your Raspberry Pi? It may be worth double-checking your wiring as well just to make sure everything is connected correctly.

Hi Andrew,Firstly, thank you for all your help and in setting that up that demo.Our aim was to connect a Pi3 + the serial card and read from the serial port of an environmental analyser, that's where we were having the problems. After you confirmed the card works with the Pi3 we wrote a program to simulate the analyser instead, running on a PC and low and behold everything works fine. Therefore we have concluded the issue seems to be signal threshold problems, as removing the terminator resistor from the serial pi card we finally got some response from the analyser, unfortunately, the data was corrupt. So, from what we can gather the issue seems to be the power required to get a response from the tech we are interfacing to and not any IoT/Pi3/Serial issue.Thanks again for your help.Cheers.