Welcome to our second article on the standard serial protocol of the Protek D620. If you haven’t read our first article on this topic, you should go back and do so now.
We also got a little history on this device. It’s not made by the real Protek, it’s just some Korean electronics developer that uses the Protek name. This developer does not support the D620 (discontinued) and the real Protek certainly does not support it, so this device currently lives in the limbo space between alive and dead known as… Abandonware!
Abandonware is usually used to refer to software, but it’s also a very appropriate term for hardware that is no longer supported by it’s manufacturer. This is a good and a bad thing, really. It’s bad (and rather pitiful, actually) that the manufacturer won’t support their own device. But it’s good in that we can probably do just about anything we want to the device and we won’t get nastygrams or cease and desist letters about publishing our stuff on the web. And it’s great when you DO get nastygrams, because you can simply ask if the developer is going to resume support on the device. Either you shame them into it, or you’re free to go. I’ll let you know if Protek Asia turns out to want to support this device again…
In the meantime, we will try to provide enough resources for those remaining users to get what you want (and more) out of the toy you paid your hard earned loot for. Since we haven’t yet extracted the firmware of the device, it’s hard to say what exactly you can do over RS232. However, by disassembling the crappy old software tool we can get a sneak peek at the most common commands you will probably be using.
The protek D620 supports a very limited set of serial commands used to open comms, close comms, get a measurement, and fetch from the device’s datalog. But how would one find such interesting bits if one were trying to document one’s own piece of abandonware? Disassembly! Actually, in this case it would be decompilation since the vendor tool was written in VB3, and VB3 is not assembled. Maybe not even compiled, but that’s splitting hairs I suppose.
To decompile the tool, you will need DoDi’s VB3/4 decompiler. Search it on Google, or get it from Woodmann’s page. Now if you are using XP, you will get all sorts of insufficient resource errors when trying to run this tool. Even the installer will crash out. You will need to run both of them in w98 compatibility mode and force it to 256 colors. That should get it installed and running.
Continued on Next Page…
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