AMB Protocol?

The serial is the easy part.
I have them somehwere...(I will see if I can find them)

USB is a pain and AMB won't give them out....

A USB Sniffer could be used.

Tres said:

The serial is the easy part.
I have them somehwere...(I will see if I can find them)

USB is a pain and AMB won't give them out....

A USB Sniffer could be used.

Click to expand...

Thank you so much! I figured the serial part wouldn't be to hard.

I imagine it just sends the transponder ID across everytime the person crosses the wire and the software does all the timing calculations.

For the USB part I may just have to make a small app that just listens on the USB port to see what the decoder sends across.

Thanks again!
Shan

I looked at the info from the older AMB20 systems. The decoder sends info such as tansponder number, total time, lap time, split times.... a lot of info. When I did timing of the Saturday Night Lightning kart races for ESPN2 they custom made some software to pull the info from the decoder for the live TV feeds and I was able to work with them while they did that. Basically, the software just sorted and formatted the info from the serial port.

This info is saved in the decoder so if your computer would happen to "go down" you can actually keep running the race and recall the info that is stored on the decoder. But I doubt that any aftermarket RC software can do that... it was mainly there for use with events such as kart races.

Thanks Hank!

I did not know the decoders actually stored any info or processed the lap times. I thought it was all PC Software driven.

Hi, i'm a bit interested in this topic, in particular about the serial protocol, if anyone got any infos please tell me

Best bet would be just to open up terminal and connect it to the serial post and view what is coming across the serial port.

hankster said:

Best bet would be just to open up terminal and connect it to the serial post and view what is coming across the serial port.

Click to expand...

that's true, but atm i've no decoder, and i'm interested only to know the protocol and the datagram sent to made up a linux timing system

It's all sent in ascii text so if you look at the info with a terminal program you can clearly read what is being sent by the decoder.

the transmissiom= 9600 8N1
the string = AMB20 Output @010204382050 (Car1;hours2;min4;Sec38;20Mil Sec;50Hits)

If you have some schematics about AMB20 decoder and transmitter or equivalent please sen me

Best regards
Coraz

coraz said:

the transmissiom= 9600 8N1
the string = AMB20 Output @010204382050 (Car1;hours2;min4;Sec38;20Mil Sec;50Hits)

If you have some schematics about AMB20 decoder and transmitter or equivalent please sen me

Best regards
Coraz

Click to expand...

I too am trying to find info on the tcp protocol used by the AMB decoder. I can read port 5403 and I am receiving data but it is not ascii - does anyone know how to read this data?

Try some of the other options in Wireshark for decodes.
Hex, etc....

Does anyone know how the end data is stored in the AMB software? I'd like to be able to pass the data in XML to a web service to store in a database.

Hi myosin, I'm trying to emulate the an AMB decoder to connect my lap counter system directly with all software supporting the AMB protocol.

Do you have any other information about the proctocol :

1. initialization data send by the decoder on port opening
2. Any other data send, not related to the Lap data.

Thank

JokerT3F said:

Hi myosin, I'm trying to emulate the an AMB decoder to connect my lap counter system directly with all software supporting the AMB protocol.

Do you have any other information about the proctocol :

1. initialization data send by the decoder on port opening
2. Any other data send, not related to the Lap data.

Thank

Click to expand...

It issues a "status" every 5 seconds - noise level, gps setting, temperature and a few more not-so-important items

other than the lap data and the status every 5 seconds, it doesn't send anything unless a command is sent to it to do things like ask for version number, resend the passings, clear the passings, reset tcp/ip connection, etc.

Unless you know how to read hex, I would recommend using the RS232 port - I haven't checked it because I don't have a serial port but I was told that it is straight ascii text. Fire up any terminal program and you should be able to connect and log everything coming across.

Joker, did you ever get anywhere with this? I'm kind of interested in how you would go about emulating the hardware decoder?

help

myosin said:

Wireshark is a good "sniffer" but it will not be able to decode the data.

Not to worry though... I already figured it out.

Typical stream:
8E 02 33 00 0F 08 00 00 01 00 01 04 3D 00 00 00 03 04 1D 73 87 00 04 08 E8 7E 98 69 24 50 04 00 05 02 22 00 06 02 03 00 08 02 00 00 81 04 B0 14 02 00 8F

This stream is a "passing" (identified by bytes 9 and 10),
It is passing number 61
Transponder ID is: 8876xxx
RTC TIME in hex is: E8 7E 98 69
RTC DATE in hex is: 24 50 04 00

Plus a few other types of info.

Click to expand...

My amb decoder send for example this :
$1E0254A10D002D2249433E00

can you help me to traduce it ?
Thanks

Stuck

Same here, I am trying to translate the Hex but can't get it.