Direct PC Control via Serial - eliminate the EB500

Jeffg

Building an ROV Tank with my BoeBot,·an 1/12 scale model tank, a laptop, and MSRS.

It is all working except that the EB500 Bluetooth connection is a bit flakey and has limited range.

So, I added an old laptop which I can control via RDP wirelessly.

Now, I would like to direct-connect the serial control connection. I played with the settings on the BoeBot and MSRS and failed miserably.

Question 1: Is it possible to direct-control through the BOE serial port? Or is that reserved for downloading to the Stamp?

Question 2: If I pull the EB500, that should free up three ports and I should be able to direct connect the serial port -- yes -- no -- maybe ???


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Franklin

You will need level shifters if you plan to connect the serial port of a laptop to a pin on the bot but it is doable.

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- Stephen

Jeffg

like a max232 ?

Unsoundcode

Hi Jeffg, yes the MAX 232 will allow you to connect the PC serial to·the Stamp pins. You can also use the programming port for serial·communications.

The MAX is easier to deal with from a programming point of view, when you use the programming port the Stamp "echoes" back to the PC the characters you send ,which means you have to filter the echo or the next transmission will send data from the previous transmission. With a MAX 232 this problem does not exist.

Jeff T.

Jeffg

I found an old Nuts and Volts article (Vol 3) that had a schematic and an explanation for connecting a PC to a Stamp. It is called Data Exchange with Visual Basic.

The schematic included the Max232, four caps, and connected to pins 0(RX), 1(tx), 2(rts), 3(cts).

It appears that these are the same ports that the onboard serial connector uses. If so, can the two ports co-exist provided that I use only one at a time?

I ask because my serial board works great with the test programs but still cannnot connect with the computer using COM1. If I move the cable to the on-bard serial port, everything still works great.

Franklin

Show us what you have (schematic) and your code (use the attachment manager to attach the .bs2 file)

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- Stephen

Jeffg

Here you go.
the word file contains the schematic plus copies of code from the BoeBotControl.cs, and BoeBotControlforMSRS.bs. I also attached the complete files.


thanks for your help. I will continue trying to get things to work and post the results when I figure out what I did wrong.

jeff

Kevin Wood

You can use the serial programming connector on the Board of Education. Here is a short write-up of a project that I was playing around with that did something similar with a homework board:

http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?p=663025

Jeffg

Very cool !

I will give it a try this weekend.

thx much !

j