During the development of a Hart field devices I soon felt the need for a tool that could mimic a Hart master. Of course there are various types of communicators around but most are expensive and did not meet my requirements.  

* 	It should be capable of repeating a command undefinitely or break the repeat at  
	a transmission error. 
*	It should be relatively easy to add (new) commands 

*	It should adhere the Hart bustiming requirements as good as possible

* 	Preferably it should work with burst mode devices

*	It should run in a console or in a xterm window (makes it easy to use it from 
	distance)

*	It should use a database where the definition of request- and response frames
	is kept. This way it is easy to maintain many different devices.

*	It should be able to run as primary- or secundary master

*	It should be able to show burstmode frames

*	It should run on Linux

The tool which I came up with is the result of an evolutionay process and I believe is still far from perfect but has proven to be very useful. My C programming skills are to be classified as 'basic' and I welcome any improvement that may arise. Also keep in mind that English is not my native language.

I hope that the tool presented here can help others to improve their product, the repeat mode is specially useful to spot random and unexpected changes in presented data values caused by programming errors in the field device code or race conditions in the processing of the data.

The documentation is not yet complete. My wish is that it is useful to others and that the licencing rules will be respected. I hope that contributions from the community may lead to improvements.

Be sure to use a Hart(r) compliant modem, preferably with RS232(serial) connection. 'Standard' serial ports are preferred (/dev/ttyS*). Many USB serial dongles have issues. I had very good results with 3 instances of 'master', one running as primary master, one running as secundary master and one as burst mode monitor. (/dev/ttyS0, /dev/ttyS1 and /dev/ttyS4) Check that your kernel supports enough serial ports by default.


BUILD:

At some linux distros I had to include -ltinfo, in others not.
lbmysqlclient-dev and  libncurses5-dev should be installed 

Perl-Tk:

with cpan install Tk and the missing functions


***  Hart is a registered trademark of the HART Communication Foundation ***