Serial Port Sharing

[WildCat]

Ok, Ive been working on and tweaking my setup for a while now to get it to where I want it. The last major thing before I move onto a few other projects is to be able to power cycle the stb with sage. Now with some help from bcjenkins I think I'm going in the right direction with the perlscript or the dtvcon program. The problem I'm running onto with either of these now is that its saying the com port is already in use.

Now my setup is I'm running XP, and using the patterson serial to usb adapter to a D11-100 and its working fine. But Im not sure what I need to do to make the com1 port work for these other programs to allow this to work. Any suggestions and all help is appreciated!
p-

[WildCat]

Ok, update. If I quit and close all the sage apps I'm able to use the dtvcon to power cycle the box. However it ends up being that either sage or that program can work the box. Not both, add to that all the serial port splitters Ive seen seem to cost around 100$ this isnt looking good.

Anyone know of any good free splitters or have any other ideas that will allow two things to access the stb?

[bcjenkins]

If you install Cygwin to run the perl script, can you access the port? If not, I know you can do this scripted. ie quit sage, reboot the box, start sage. You should also send a request to sage to add the functionality in or to release the port after every command.

B

[WildCat]

Haven't run Cygwin yet. I installed ActivePerl to run the script. I had to download a different script though for windows form here and followed their directions:
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php...TV_D11_via_USB

After doing that I was able to use the script to power the box, unfortunately I need to make sure that nothing else is accessing the port for the script to work.

When I was originally looking to do this I saw a few posts where people were asking about this but none of the posts had any answers, so I figured the feature was already requested. Ill send an email off asking for this ability though, would make life easier for me when I'm traveling and the box at home has been turned off or with power outages.