socat - the guide to remote serial, PanelDue and Telnet(ish)

A Former User

Disclaimer; I just know enough to be dangerous ... and went down this rabbit hole trying to use a PanelDue with an unsupported Duet3 prototype. Anyways, I'll list a few commands below that may or may not be useful to others trying to solve interesting problems in interesting ways..

The first scenario was having the PanelDue attached to a USB to TTL adapter on the Raspberry Pi that was connected to the Duet. The Pi has both the SPI connection, and the (USB) serial connection. The easy solution would be to glue the two serial ports together. After realizing socat didn't care I had beforehand set baud rates with stty it worked just fine.

/dev/USB0 is the (FTDI) USB to TTL, and /dev/ACM0 is the Duet (USB) serial port:
socat /dev/ttyUSB0,raw,echo=0,b57600 /dev/ttyACM0,raw,echo=0,b115200
or
pi@duet3:~ $ socat -lm /dev/ttyUSB0,raw,echo=0,b57600 EXEC:/opt/dsf/bin/CodeConsole,su=root,pty,stderr

This got me thinking, we could forward the Duet's serial port to a TCP port, this should give access to the console even if DSF is not runnng.
pi@duet3:~ $ socat /dev/ttyACM0,raw,echo=0,b115200 tcp-listen:23,reuseaddr
or
pi@duet3:~ $ socat -lm -d -d TCP-LISTEN:23,fork EXEC:/opt/dsf/bin/CodeConsole,su=root,pty,stderr

Having done that I realize I could then move the FTDI USB to TTL adapter and PanelDue to any machine on my network and bridge the serial port over TCP.
pi@duet3:~ $ socat /dev/ttyACM0,raw,echo=0,b115200 tcp-listen:2323,reuseaddr
bearer@remotemachine:~$ socat -d -d /dev/ttyUSB1,raw,echo=0,b57600 tcp:duet3.local:2323
or
pi@duet3:~ $ socat -lm -d -d TCP-LISTEN:2323,fork EXEC:/opt/dsf/bin/CodeConsole,su=root,pty,stderr
bearer@remotemachine:~$ socat -d -d /dev/ttyUSB1,raw,echo=0,b57600 tcp:duet3.local:2323

The above was all tested and found working. There are probably some of you that have improvements to suggest and I welcome those. Especially on error handling and such. I've never been known to leave a rabbit hole untill all the rabbits have been "dealt" with, so in a future post I'll try to add some systemd stuff and try to have socat execute CodeConsole instead using the serial connection, as well as trying to have socat execute ssh to setup the far side all in one command (maybe).

gtj0

@bearer socat is one of those hidden gems that you can find all sorts of uses for. You can even use it to monitor the unix socket the DuetControlServer creates...

With the DuetControlServer running...

mv /var/run/dsf/dcs.sock /var/run/dsf/dcs.sock.original
socat -t100 -x -v UNIX-LISTEN:/var/run/dsf/dcs.sock,mode=777,reuseaddr,fork UNIX-CONNECT:/var/run/dsf/dcs.sock.original

A Former User

The force is strong in this one!