To give someone a good starting place with the TUMPA device.
On a Linux system to get a decent start and test to make sure your TUMPA board is working. Mine is for Ubuntu 12.04 x64.
Read
http://www.tiaowiki.com/w/TIAO_USB_Multi_Protocol_Adapter_User's_Manual as you go along. It is actually quite helpful along with this starter guide.
To start, you will need to move the 3x8 TTL-COM jumpers from the default position of "Top Row & Middle Row" if you are following the guide... to the new position of "Middle Row & Bottom Row" to put the RS232 TTL-OUT as active. Once you have done that, remove the jumper from the Upper RS232 "c60" postion where it is currently located at 5&6, and place it on pin 1&2 on the TTL-COM row (or the 2x6 TTL) located at the bottom of the board. Once you have done this, your board is now in "Self test" mode or "loopback".
Essentially what we have done here is take the TTL section that is 3x8 TTL and made it go from "SELECT" mode, to "TTL-OUT" mode.... Meaning it will now utilize the bottom row of TTL-COM pins or the 2x6 TTL pins. Once you have selected to use those... We needed to set the TX(send) and RX(receive) to speak so that we could test the loopback functionality of the device. If you read in the manual, pins 5&6 on the upper RS232 "c60" pins are the TX and RX pins, while pins 1&2 are the TX and RX pins for the lower 2x6 TTL pins. These are all documented in the manual.
Once you hook your TUMPA via USB to your system, run
dmesg | grep USB
. Verify that the output toward the end says that the "FTDI device is attached at ttyUSB0". Next, get minicom by running
sudo apt-get install minicom
Once minicom is installed, from your terminal window,
minicom
It will then be at an almost blank screen with very little information. Minicom is pretty easy to navigate once you get used to it. To start, make sure minicom is set to read the /dev/ttyUSB0 device. And the settings for the TUMPA serial test are either 115200 8N1 or 9600 8N1. To set these settings within minicom, use the key combo Ctrl+A, then press Z to access the menu (note: a shortcut for it is Ctrl+A, Then the letter of the shortcut, in our example... it's O.).... So from that menu... You will need to press O unless you used the shortcut. Once in that menu, you will need to select the option "Serial Port Setup". Once in that sub-menu, select E for Bps/Par/Bits. And from there you can either set it to 115200 or 9600 (C or E), and then Q for 8N1. You can exit that menu. Saving it is recommended. While in there, you can verify that /dev/ttyUSB0 is set as well. NOTE: That is a zero and not the letter OH.
EDIT: Hardware and Software Flow Control should both be set to "No".
Once these settings are in there, you should have full connectivity to your device via USB to the serial interface on the device! Exit minicom and re-open it with the settings from before. To do this, you'll want to do is either run
sudo minicom savefilename
or
sudo minicom
if you saved it as your default.
Once you have re-opened minicom, you should be able to test anything that you type at all and it will show on the screen directly as you type it. What this means is it is getting sent via minicom to the device, then going into the device and getting output by the device as well and then getting printed back on the screen!
I hope that this has been helpful to someone that needs a good starting point with the TUMPA and if anyone is interested, I can post more of these once I learn small tips and tricks that might help along the way. I look forward to lots of fun with the TUMPA. And minicom seems to be a very handy program for interfacing with it.