FS-8705-06 GPA (General Purpose ASCII) Manual Page 3 of 15
FieldServer Technologies 1991 Tarob Court Milpitas, California 95035 USA Web:www.fieldserver.com
Tel: (408) 262-2299 Fax: (408) 262-9042 Toll_Free: 888-509-1970 email: support@fieldserver.com
1. GPA (General Purpose ASCII) Driver Description The serial GPA (General Purpose ASCII) Driver allows the FieldServer to accept data from
remote devices which produce an ASCII byte stream. A typical example of such a device is an
electronic scale producing an output similar to the one below.
:weight 0.57 Kg Tare 44.3 Kg 1 2 3 4 -5 -6.7
The driver waits passively for messages. When a message is received the driver converts each
space delimited string of characters/numbers into a number. The numbers so formed are stored
in consecutive elements of a Data Array. Referring to the example above, the driver will store
the value .57 in the 1st element of the Data Array (DA), the value 44.3 in the next element, the
value 1 in the next, the value 2 in the next etc.
The driver can process negative numbers.
This driver has significant limitations:
Only one data stream per connection - if two different streams of string data are sent to the
same port, the data from the one will overwrite data from the other.
The driver can only process numbers that are presented in a simple numeric form.
Hexadecimal, Exponent-mantissa and other complex forms cannot be processed.
Max Nodes Supported
FieldServer Mode Nodes Comments
Client 1 Only 1 node per port.
Server The driver cannot serve data