Alternative serial driver

[MichielT]

For some reason I kept getting errors when I tried using serial ports (TCP worked fine). So decided that the logical next step was to integrate my own implementation of jSerialcom (the driver openpnp uses already). 

Compared to the existing async driver, both read and write are async. It tracks the lifetime of each message, but can work blocked if needed (because openpnp itself doesn't really support async). So far it seems to work fine. 

I wrote it just to fix my use case and because I thought it was a nice challenge. I doubt there's any worthwhile speed improvement. Would anyone else be actually interested in this? Because based on the 'contributor guidelines' it would be a lot of work to document this properly etc for a PR. Not even sure it would be valid because I'm using java 24.

[MichielT]

Forgot to include a link to the fork. https://github.com/michieltjampens/openpnp/tree/serialswap

The driver is actually agnostic to the interface, adding tcp/udp... would be easy.

[Michael Scott]

I have a PandaPlacer that I've used sparingly over the past few years. Today as I was preparing to start a new project the PC started acting strange, long store short... some of the operating system files became corrupted and I was not able to get Windows 10 to startup. I was able to recover all of the install, machine, parts, packages, boards, and projecct files.

I have 2 questions, maybe 3 or more...

1, Is there a published process of recovering all the machine/board specific files into a fresh installation of Openpnp?

2, Should I stay with Windows or move to Linux? If I move to Linux how steep is the learning curve?

3, If I move to Linux, can my existing files from the Windows install be used in a new install of Linux?

4, Which version of Linux is best? I've used Ubuntu before, but I'm no expert.

Thank you and best Regards,

Michael Scott