Using VDT2 Serial in Linux/Wine

Hello All,

I have a Parr Bomb Calorimeter Digital Thermometer that has an available serial port for data logging (this is used for an undergraduate chemistry lab). In the past I have used Igor in Win7 with VDT2 to control and scrape the data from the instrument. I have been trying to implement the same thing Arch Linux using Wine 1.9 with Igor 6.37 with no success. The VDT2 window does not display anything nor am I able to write anything in it. I can easily read and write to serial using minicom - so I'm not sure if there is something simple I am overlooking or that VDT2 comms is not a possibility in linux (though I hope this isn't the case because I love ArchLinux and I love Igor - they should be together).

A homebrew test I tried was with a microcontroller programmed to spit out random values when fed anything through serial while LEDs were tied to the operation. In win7, everything worked flawlessly. In linux, when the microcontroller was connected I could write to the device in the VDT2 window. The LEDs would confirm successful call and response but no received values would show up in the VDT2 window - only what I had written would be displayed. This added to my confusion.

Has anyone successfully used VDT2 in Wine? If so what steps did you take to get there? If not, does anyone have ideas of workarounds I could experiment with or places to go for direction?

And as always, will we see a Linux version of Igor 7 once it is out of beta?

- W. Leon
wjleon wrote:

And as always, will we see a Linux version of Igor 7 once it is out of beta?


No, not anytime in the near future.
All I can tell you is that on Windows VDT2 uses standard Windows communications calls (GetCommState, SetCommState, CreateFile, WriteFile, ReadFile, CreateEvent, GetOverlappedResult).

The source code for VDT2 is part of the XOP Toolkit.