Using BS2 as a pass-thru from PC to serial device

OldIron

I have students in a high school class that are driving a robot arm right now successfully using SEROUT commands on a BS2 (lifted from boe-bots).

Unfortunately, the programs they'd like to write won't fit in the BS2 nor does the BS2 have easy handling of real numbers, especially with division.

So, we came up with a scheme for them to program on a PC. Obviously, it would be better to drive the robot arm directly from the PC, but there are no serial ports on most modern PCs. We would use the BS2 as a pass-thru device to talk to the robot arm (since that works well right now). The BS2 would do a DEBUGIN to get data from the PC usb port and pass to the arm using to the serout command.

Students would send characters to the BS2 10 bytes at a time with the final 'packet' of up to 10 bytes with a CR. Students would pause some amount of time between sending packets to allow the bs2 to send the data to the arm. Within reason, longer delays won't be a problem. The BS2 code we might use:

someBytes var Byte(10)
i var Byte
do
for i = 0 to 9
someBytes(i) = 0
debugin STR someBytes\10\13 'a CR is the end of the command string for the robot arm
seqout xxxxxx 'as appropriate for the robot arm
loop

Does anyone see a problem with this scheme? Is there a better way?

Thanks in advance for any help.

tomcrawford

DEBUGIN STR will zero the remaining bytes after it sees the CR. So you don't need to fill someBytes with zeroes (you are missing the NEXT).

I don't see why the scheme won't work. Try it and see.