Re: Diagnosing ABT320 Braille Terminal

[Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org>]

On Fri, 9 May 2003, Lee Maschmeyer wrote:

> IMHO, one thing that adversely affects the Alva is that the left and
> right keys are not typematic. I doubt this matters on an 80-character
> display, but on a 40 it's a pain and I bet it's worse on a 20. Thanks to
> Nicolas I found the place in the source where I could change it, but it
> still seems an unfortunate default.

And I explained why...

> However, the Linux Alva driver seems more sluggish than (my memory of)
> the DOS program, so I don't think it's the serial port settings since
> DOS presumably uses the same ones.

On DOS the default mode of operation is through the parallel port which is a
much faster link.  Even BRLTTY is much snappier with a parallel port
connection.  But unfortunately the parallel port protocol information isn't
available and only an old binary-only library exists which just can't be
linked with BRLTTY using recent versions of gcc.

But to reduce the sluggishness a lot you can change the default serial
baudrate from 9600 to, say, 38400.  On BRLTTY's side you need to edit
Drivers/Alva/brlconf.h accordingly and recompile.  On the Alva side you need
to change the baudrate using the built-in menus accessible by pressing
PROG+HOME+CURSOR simultaneously.


Nicolas