Development Product Support Page

This support area is for Warp Nine Engineering's development products including the IEEE 1284 Driver Toolkit, W91284PIC and the W1284PIC Development Kit.

IEEE 1284 Device Driver Toolkits

W91284PIC (peripheral interface controller)

W1284PIC Development Kit

IEEE 1284 Device Driver Toolkits

Post a question on our discussion board here

For e-mail support, technical questions should be addressed to TK Support

System Libraries

Two system libraries, MSVCRT.DLL and MFC42.DLL must be installed in your Windows System folder (System32 in NT) to run our driver toolkit. These files are routinely installed by products from a variety of vendors and, for many users, will already exist. If you do not have these files, you may download them here. (~579KB)

Compaq Laptops and Portables

Some IEEE 1284 issues have been resolved by upgrading the BIOS. Visit the Compaq web site and search for the specific SoftPaq utility for your Laptop. (The SoftPaq is a BIOS update which allows you to configure the IEEE 1284 configuration).

Problems running demo application

In order to use the demo application it is required that there be a 1284 compliant peripheral there to exchange data and handshake with. (You cannot connect two PC's together; this will not work). You can try some simple things with a Lexmark or HP laser printer. If you do not have a device to test with, you may want to purchase one of our W91284PIC Development Kits. This is for designing a peripheral with our W91284PIC chip, but you can use it to simulate a PC parallel port peripheral.

Also see Toolkit frequently asked questions

W91284PIC (peripheral interface controller)

Post a question on our discussion board here

For e-mail support, technical questions should be addressed to W91284PIC Support

W1284PIC Development Kit

Post a question on our discussion board here

For e-mail support, technical questions should be addressed to W1284PIC Dev Kit Support

FAQ

Q. How do you use the development kit?

A. On the Peripheral PC with the Development card in it:

1- Run isa2pic - You should see the board is at base address 0x340h and then get the menu.

2- Select option "D" to setup the registers to default enabled value

3- Select option "8".

The software will now sit polling the Receive FIFO for any data. It will display the data on the screen whenever it gets a full FIFO, 16 bytes. If an ASCII 'Z' is detected then it will do a Carriage Return, Line Feed.

On the Host PC running PARTEST:

1- Go to the Setup menu. Make sure that the Port number is set to the LPT
port that you are connected through. Do not enable the Daisy Chain option.
Set the daisy chain device number to 1. Select ECP mode as the mode to
Negotiate to. Exit setup.

2- Select: Single Test >DC Commands >Assign Address
You should see a message "address assigned". This sets the DC address
for the W91284PIC

Single Test > DC Commands > Select Device
You should see a message "Device Selected". On the Development board you should see the green LED become lit.

Single Test > Write Data Buffer > OK

At this point you should see data on the peripheral PC.

Q. The green LED is lit, but I don't see data on the peripheral PC.

A. When you did the "Single Test > Write Data Buffer " did you see a message that data was sent? On ISA2PIC did you have Test #8 selected? That should poll until you do the write buffer and then you should see A thru Z on the screen.

Don't select option 8 on the ISA2PIC until after you've done the "Select Device" in PARTEST.

Q. I'm using a personal printer (a HP DeskJet) for testing. I connect it to the parallel port of the PC and execute the Warp Nine 1284 Driver Toolkit command: Single > Get Device ID. In the Activity Log window, I get "Received device ID(Length=138.....). If I connect the Warp Nine Development board on another PC to the parallel port of my PC, when executing the command: Single > Get Device ID, I get the error message "Error: 1284 driver detected an IEEE 1284 interface timeout at event 2". Why can't I get the Device ID like my printer? Are there any essential registers that should be set before executing "Get Device ID".

A. In general, when you connect the Development Board with Daisy Chain enabled, you need to do the "Assign Address, Select Device" before you can communicate with the board. At this point you could do "Get Device ID". Unfortunately we don't have this test setup in ISA2PIC. What customers do is write a utility that gets an interrupt on "Device ID" request. Then they write the device ID to the transmit FIFO.

Q. When I connect a printer to my parallel port and execute the command "Single > Write File", my printer will print a two page message saying "More Information About Microsoft Windows..." and "Using Write to View This Document". Is this printed file built into the driver?

A. Yes. You can have any file sent by doing the following:

Print any file you want to a File.
Name the file "partest.dat".
Copy the partest.dat file to the same directory as partest.exe.

When you do the "Send File", partest will send the file named partest.dat.

Q. If I connect a printer to the pass-through port and set it to daisy chain mode, should the printer print the same content as mentioned above?

A. It should. If you don't have the dev board selected (green LED) then the host port of the dev board is connected to the pass-through port. Any communication from the PC will go to the device on the pass-through port.

Q. I'm not very clear about the meaning of the commands in the demo 1284 Driver Toolkit included with the development board.

A. There is full documentation in the spec included with the Driver Toolkit. The Toolkit is primarily intended for programmers writing applications that interface to the driver.

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