nanoDLP

I've been using a large, dual lamp Panasonic projector in my printer, and I finally got around to setting up the RS232 commands to turn it on and off, control the internal shutter, etc. and I thought I'd share my journey in case it helped others find their way.

For starters, I'm using this USB to Serial adapter from StarTech.
https://www.startech.com/Cards-Adapters … ICUSB2321F
Many options exist, and several of them work, so add this one to the list of confirmed working adapters. You may choose a different one.
You will have to ID the USB address of your serial adapter and enter it into the "USB/Serial Port Address" field for your display.
I've got a quick video on doing this for an Arduino. The process is the same.
http://youtu.be/Laq8eovno9U

Next, I dug into the Panasonic docs to find the 232 protocol manual for my model.
ftp://ftp.panasonic.com/pub/Panasonic/D … -D232C.pdf
If RS232 or RS-232 or Serial don't return any useful results, "Control Codes" and "Protocol Manual" are other helpful search terms.

The manual lists very simple commands for power on/off and shutter open/close.

So just type PON POF OSH:0 and OSH:1 into NanoDLP and be done, right?

Wrong That would work for humans, but serial devices follow a different set of rules.

Those characters are actually just parameters that need to be inserted into the rest of the command. It's like a formula. There's a header, usually some sort of an identification, the parameters for the function that you want, and then and ending that usually includes a checksum and/or delimeter. Here's what the Panasonic command formatting looks like.

If the manufacturer is really nice, they'll give you some example command strings in the same manual that can help you find the right ID numbers, etc. If not, you'll have to go through the manual and assemble the serial string that they describe. It's tedious, and a few notches below what I'd consider fun... I cheated. I'm a Crestron programmer, and I fired up an extra processor with a program that used a Panasonic module that I knew worked. Then I pushed some buttons, and copied the command strings.
With the proper header and other bits, PON turns into .ADZZ;PON. so the start and end transmission bytes are the dots and the ADZZ are the "Two ID" and "ID Designate" bytes that go around the PON from before.

So now we've got a command! Now to make NanoDLP send it properly...

The first thing to understand is how RS232 devices communicate. The data transmission is digital 1's and 0's, and the data or baud rate is the speed that these 1's and 0's are sent. The baud rate will vary by manufacturer, and is sometimes selectable in a setup menu, but chances are pretty good that the stock 9600 setting will work for your device. And instead of having to write a thousand 1's and 0's, the devices simplify the human readable input part of it by representing them as ASCII or hexadecimal characters. We're all familiar with ASCII because that's what you're reading right now, you can think of ASCII as the letters on a keyboard. Hexadecimal is the numeric way to represent those characters with a base-16 counting system that uses 0123456789ABCDEF and makes up a range of values between 00 and FF (0 and 256). Here's a conversion table in case that helps you understand it a bit better. https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgece … _table.htm

Another bit about serial communication that's worth noting is how these commands use a delimeter to end each command. The most common delimeters are /r and /n (sometimes both). /r means "line feed" and /r means "carriage return"... That's right, we programmed computers to think they're a typewriter. Using delimeters like these are how some devices know that a command has ended. It's like the period at the end of a sentence. That's why you'll see /r and /n as serial communication options in NanoDLP. The program will automatically add the delimeter that you select to the end of every command.

In my particular case with the Panasonic projector, it doesn't use a "standard" delimeter like /r /n, so "binary" is the appropriate setting to choose. It means that the serial port will only send the characters that you tell it to - nothing else.

So... My simple PON command was used to build the proper full command according to the manufacturer's 'formula' and turned into .ADZZ;PON. Another thing to note at this point is that ASCII is caps sensitive, so an upper case P and a lower case p ARE different.
After creating the ASCII command, I then converted the string into hex because I wasn't using one of the ASCII communication options in NanoDLP, which made my command \x02\x41\x44\x5a\x5a\x3b\x50\x4f\x4e\x03
The \x indicates a hex value, and the two characters following \x are the value itself. You'll notice that there are the same number of values in ".ADZZ;PON." and "\x02\x41\x44\x5a\x5a\x3b\x50\x4f\x4e\x03" and some other similarities like how ZZ is \x5a \x5a... They're the same data in two different formats. Luckily there are websites like RapidTables that can help you do this conversion, so all you have to do is copy and paste.
https://www.rapidtables.com/convert/num … o-hex.html

That is the proper command to use for my projector's power on. It seems tedious, but that's it. \x02\x41\x44\x5a\x5a\x3b\x50\x4f\x4e\x03
Power off is \x02\x41\x44\x5a\x5a\x3b\x50\x4f\x46\x03
Shutter open is \x02\x41\x44\x5a\x5a\x3b\x4f\x53\x48\x3a\x30\x03
Shutter closed is \x02\x41\x44\x5a\x5a\x3b\x4f\x53\x48\x3a\x31\x03

To use the shutter commands in NanoDLP, you have to frame the command with [[Projector Command]], which makes the text field in NanoDLP look more like this [[Projector \x02\x41\x44\x5a\x5a\x3b\x4f\x53\x48\x3a\x30\x03 Command]]  and this [[Projector \x02\x41\x44\x5a\x5a\x3b\x4f\x53\x48\x3a\x31\x03 Command]]

But, if you enter it all correctly, it works!
Easy, right?
Good luck!

Last edited by Jimustanguitar (2018-02-13 14:12:09)