How to help Total Open Station: a brief tutorial

The first thing to do is to record something with your total station, better if it's a simple set of points. To do this we have provided for all the users a very simple graphical helper, easy to use, friendly to understand. You can find it in TOpS' main folder.

Connection parameters

If you have a manual of your device, read it and look for information about the serial connection parameters to be used. In case you haven't got any manual, you can still try with some default configurations. This is the complete list of the serial connection parameters that can be adjusted (from the pySerial documentation), with their default values:

• port=None
• baudrate=9600 #baudrate
• bytesize=EIGHTBITS #number of databits
• parity=PARITY_NONE #enable parity checking
• stopbits=STOPBITS_ONE #number of stopbits
• timeout=None #set a timeout value, None for waiting forever
• xonxoff=0 enable software flow control
• rtscts=0 #enable RTS/CTS flow control

Most of the times with some trial-and-error you will be able to find out in a few minutes the right parameters for your device.

Downloading data

We assume that your device can send data to the PC as ASCII. This is true for almost any total station.

There are two ways to download data:

1. with the UNIX cat command
2. using pySerial from the Python interactive terminal

Using cat

cat is a low-level UNIX command that should be available on all GNU/Linux distributions, Mac OS X etc.

If you connected the total station with a serial-to-USB adapter (a common situation because modern laptops haven't got any serial port), the device will be available as /dev/ttyUSB0.

1. open a terminal emulator
2. cd to the directory where you want to download data
3. cat /dev/ttyUSB0 > your_data_file (the actual file name can be anything valid of course)
4. start the download from the device menu (each one is different, but you should already know how to do this)
5. wait for your total station to complete the procedure
6. if there were no errors or beeps, chances are that all went fine
7. open your_data_file with your favourite text editor (but also less will do for now) and see what is inside:
   • if you see strange characters like ? the procedure went wrong. Don't panic! See the section below
   • if you see letters and numbers that look like the points you recorded, you succeeded downloading your first data file

Using pySerial interactively

For now see this blog post to see what I did. Full instructions coming soon.