Telos Direct Interface Module (DIM)

I am not entirely sure if this thing is fully functional. It *does* turn on. Red Power light cones on. Green Line 4 light comes on. Does this mean it is fully functional? Probably not. I am not knowing

I figured that it must have some way to program it via serial interface, so I downloaded the manual, found correct serial parameters and set Baud Rate to 1200 (in my 30+ years of working with all types of hardware with serial interfaces I have never ever seen a device that required such low baud rate), 8-N-1, no parity, no flow control.

Now, I have 3 different USB-to-Serial adapters.

FTDI,

Prilific,

Keyspan,

And no less than 10 different serial cables, because Engineering teams at Cisco, Jupiter, Mellanox, Palo Alto, HP, Dell, Sun and IBM were under the impression that their customers would not dare using hardware from any other vendor, so they would either re-invent the serial protocol or support only one of 3 most popular chipsets but only partially. So it was a Russian roulette of trying different combinations of a USB-to-Serial adapter, serial cable, driver and terminal app settings.

So, I tries them all, and the only USB-to-Serial adapter that worked to some extent was the FTDI one.
It has yellow and green LEDs to show RX/TX status, so when I power cycled the DIM, I got “Initializing” message in my terminal, after which all communication stooped.

It seems to me that DIM is expecting something back from the terminal, but not getting it. I am suspecting that my laptop is to blame, but you never know.

I will try with another computer tomorrow and if I get anywhere, I’ll update this listing. But for now it is sold as “untested”, with a possibility that it does not work.

But I will ship it to you professionally packed and insured FREE of charge within one business day