MAC address & FTDI PID feature request

Hi there,

I have a couple of feature requests for your enterprise hardware line - hopefully these are things you’ll consider adding.

  1. It would be very useful if the MAC Address of the various sensor modules was accessible without having to remove the Xbee chip from the module e.g., as a sticker on the back of the sensor.

  2. It would also very useful if the PIDs on your FTDI chips were unique to NCD (https://www.ftdichip.com/Support/Knowledgebase/index.html?caniuseftdisvidformypr.htm).

Thanks a lot!
Cormac

Hi Cormac,

  1. When the sensor powers up it sends a RUN message. the message looks like this
    7E 00 1C 90 00 13 A2 00 41 81 50 E9 FF FE C2 7A 00 00 00 07 00 00 52 55 4E 00 00 00 00 00 00 8A
    Over here the mac address is 00 13 A2 00 41 81 50 E9
    The sensor also sends this message when user hits the reset button.
    We will add a sticker as well :slight_smile:

  2. Excellent suggestion,. Just created a profile. Our PID is 0x7BCD.

Cheers!!!

Thanks for the quick response Bhaskar - much appreciated!

For the new custom NCD PID, if we order new enterprise modules will they ship with this new PID?

Thanks again,
Cormac

Yes, they will come with the new PID.

Thanks

Wow - that’s great news, thanks so much Bhaskar - I’m impressed by your excellent customer support!

I have a couple of follow-up questions for you:

  1. Can you please give us your FT_Program “Template” (XML file) so that we can flash our existing NCD devices to match the future devices that will use your new PID?

  2. Do you know when the new MAC address stickers will be available? Is that something we should request when we make our next order?

Thanks again,
Cormac

  1. The profile can be found here
    https://github.com/ncdcommunity/ncd.io-IoT-Wireless-Sensor-Recovery-Files

  2. All Enterprise product will come with MAC address stickers

Cheers!!!

That’s excellent - thanks again for the great customer support Bhaskar!

Hi Cormac,
please hold on the ftdi PID update. it looks like the device is not registering as com port after the update. It requires a change in ftdi driver .inf file as well.
Once i finalize the testing i will update the profile.

Update : I updated the .inf files but it needs to be approved by FTDI. I wrote them. once they approve the driver w should be good to go.
Thanks

Thanks a lot for the update Bhaskar - we’ll hold off on our end for now.

Best,
Cormac

Hi Cormac,
Looks like this wasn’t as straight forward as i thought. We will need to edit the drivers and will need to certify the drivers. FTDI also mentioned that we will need to maintain the drivers as well.

This might work in windows case but things get more complicated when it comes to MAC and linux. Users will need to update driver files ( manually on individual basis). it might create more problems than solving.

ps. from today onwards all enterprise products will be shipped with MAC address stickers.
Thanks

Hi Bhaskar, thanks for the update - that’s great about the MAC stickers!

If it’s helpful, when we were testing internally we only renamed the device string rather than the PID/VID, which meant that we didn’t need to update the drivers. Any chance you could use the default PID/VID? That would be really helpful since we only need the device description string to be unique to NCD.

Best,
Cormac

Cormac,
I am doing something similar as well. I kept the PID/VID same and changed the manufacture name to “ncd.io
and product description to “ncd.io wireless modem”.
We can definitely do this for all the users as well.

The updated ftdi profile can be found here.

Cheers!!!

That’s great Bhaskar - thanks again!