Rev 1.0 07-Mar-2012 - r.schramm

Both ships have an LED alphanumeric display in the ROV Control Room for displaying system time (GMT) along with ROV Depth and Position. Note that sometimes the Vorne is alternately referred to as the 'Delta Display'

The specific item is:
 

Vorne Industries, Inc. 1145 Industrial Dr. Itasca, IL 60143  www.vorne.com

Model 2180-SB-120 4-line alphanumeric display, serial buffer, 120volts.

Replacement cost is $836 in 2/2012 dollars.

 http://www.vorne.com/message-displays-2100ser.htm

We also purchased a 3u filler panel from BlackBox for rack-mounting the display. A drawing for the cut-out is here.. Added a generic A/C switch from Potters Electronics.

 Hardware Setup

The Vorne display must be configured once before use (configuration is stored in on-board flash memory).  The manual describes what to do to navigate the menus in Section 3. The manual is attached to this confluence page as a pdf (see 'Attachments Tab' above). Save yourself a headache...BEFORE READING THE MANUAL.... Section 3 is worthwhile, ignore all of Section 4 - SCRIPTS.  We use vt102 terminal mode so none of section 4 applies to our configuration.

• To access the setup menus, you must first attach the setup jumper.. Highly recommend a single-pole switch (as shown in Manual Page 8 Fig 5.) between the ISO-GND and SETUP Terminals. Using the switch makes it easy to jump back and forth between setup and operating mode as your familiarizing/testing.

• If manual is available; setup mode, menus and choices are described in Section 3. But the bottom line is: In Setup Mode, use F1&F2 to move between Menus/SubMenus and Choices. Use F3 as the Enter/Select button. For our use, we can just 'Restore System Defaults' and then enter the differences.
• Differences from factory defaults are:
  1. In the SerialPortSetup menu: BAUDRATE=9600*
  2. In the GeneralSetup menu: BOOTMESSAGE=OFF,  TERMINALMODE=VT102, VERTICALSCROLL=NO

Make sure to navigate to 'Exit' between each submenu to get back to the top-level.

• Once these are changed, removing the jumper (open the switch) and you will have a few seconds to press F3 again to cause the unit to flash the changes. When you done, permanently remove the setup jumper/switch.

• IMPORTANT: The RS232 connection to the DB9 must have pin7 jumper'd to pin 9 in the backshell (makes no sense to me) for the unit to receive characters.
  

Software Setup

The display is driven by a single serial line from the Navproc. (Typically Board1 Port6) The Navproc is configured in its coreNav.wf or coreNav.rc   to execute task vorneTask() at startup. (see cfg file in /usr/bin/tiburon2/navproc)

vorneTask() takes standard digiports input board and port numbers as arguments. The navproc coreNav.cfg file must have the serialPort service configured to the correct 9600-8-1-none etc at the top of the config file, and the matching arguments made for the board/port in the execute tasks portion of the file below... the relevant lines for WesternFlyer are:

** Any changes made to the coreNav config file will only take effect the next time the navproc code is started.

Software Internals

Refer to  /usr/tiburon/src/vorne.c  The vorneTask() is the main entry point and takes standard digiports input board and port numbers as arguments. The basic flow is that the vorneTask() initializes the serial port specified in its argument list and then starts datamanger item consumers for ROV Depth, Lat and Lon items. It one-time-only clears all of the character positions of the display using VT102 Escape sequence described below and <space> characters. Then control goes into a forever loop, reading those dm items, formatting them for output via serial port, and then sleeping for .9 seconds.

Some points to note....

1. depth items is produced from pressure and ships lat, using standard algorithms by another navproc task (depthCalcTask()). 
2. Rov Lat/Lon is likewise produced by  the navproc rovPositionTask() from winfrog serial data. The specific datamanger item names consumed are defined in dvecsIntfc.h.****NOTE THIS NEEDS TO BE RESOLVED FOR MIGRATION TO Rachel Carson... Vorne did not exist on Pt.Lobos/Ventana and the items names are different ! ***
3. The vorneTask() uses the old VT102 ascii terminal command syntax to position the cursor.  <esc>[1,1H is the string command to move the cursor to row1,column1. Then <vertical tab> (0x0B) is used to move relative for text appearing on line, 2,3 and 4.
4. If any garbage exists/gets written to character cells not normally written to during operation (ie in <space> positions beyond end of line, it will remain there. The vorneTask makes an attempt to clear all character position by writing <space> to all lines/cells on startup, but not after that.
5. The vorne display has significant lag in the time it takes to render the screen.... the serial write is practically immediate; the internal rendering of all the character positions takes perhaps a half-a-second or more. 

vorne.jpg (image/jpeg)
2100sb.pdf (application/pdf)