TRACGEN, an OpenTRAC KISS Frame Generator

To support development of OpenTRAC hardware and software I developed this little tool called "tracgen" which will generate OpenTRAC position elements. The elements are generated from an input file containing frames in TNC2 format. One could use a client application or something like Afilter to generate such a file. The OpenTRAC elements are encapsulated in AX.25 frames (with the OpenTRAC PID of 0x77), converted into KISS frames and then made available on a serial port of your choice, at the speed of your choice.

Tracgen is a Win32 application and has been tested on Windows 95 and Windows 2000. No installation procedure is required other than unzipping the tracgen.zip file into a directory of your choice. Run it from a command line prompt (DOS box).

Currently, tracgen will only convert position frames with and without timestamps, including the compressed format. However, you do not need to edit the input file in order to delete unsupported frames. It will simply only parse the ones it can convert.

Tracgen requires 4 command line parameters. These are:

1) input_file  --> name of the file containg the TNC-2 type frames

2) serial_port --> a number from 1 to 4 indicating which comport you'd like to use

3) baud_rate   --> valid values are 110, 300, 600, 1200, 2400, 4800, 7200, 9600, 14400, 19200, 38400, 57600 and 115200.

4) pause_time  --> number of seconds ([1..60]) to pause between the transmission
of frames

An example of how to start tracgen from the command line:

tracgen frames.txt 2 9600 3

This will start tracgen on serial port 2 (COM2) at 9600 baud with 3 seconds between frames and it will read the frames from the file "frames.txt".

I have made no provisions to set the number of data bits, number of stop bits or the parity. Tracgen will assume the "standard" 8 databits, 1 stop bit and No parity bits.