Scribbler2 SCB to spin?
Phil or Parallax,
I just purchased an S2 this week and I have been having a great time learning about robotics and the propeller chip from this little guy. I am new to robotics, but have been programming in a variety of languages since 1978.
My platform of choice is now Ubuntu Linux, and the S2 GUI program runs great in wine, but I cannot get it to talk to the serial port enough to get it to work completely (as I've seen others report). I'd love to get a native linux version of this running or at least something that can convert the *.scb xml files to spin. I have had great luck with BST in getting spin code working on the robot, and have been able to complete things like Jessica's great name demo: http://forums.parallax.com/entry.php?171-Scribble-Your-Name-with-the-S2-Robot
Could you give me some pointers to get started on this? I'm happy to contribute whatever I come up with back to the list...
I just purchased an S2 this week and I have been having a great time learning about robotics and the propeller chip from this little guy. I am new to robotics, but have been programming in a variety of languages since 1978.
My platform of choice is now Ubuntu Linux, and the S2 GUI program runs great in wine, but I cannot get it to talk to the serial port enough to get it to work completely (as I've seen others report). I'd love to get a native linux version of this running or at least something that can convert the *.scb xml files to spin. I have had great luck with BST in getting spin code working on the robot, and have been able to complete things like Jessica's great name demo: http://forums.parallax.com/entry.php?171-Scribble-Your-Name-with-the-S2-Robot
Could you give me some pointers to get started on this? I'm happy to contribute whatever I come up with back to the list...
Comments
-Phil
Unfortunately that button (along with the all the other buttons dealing with communicating with the S2) does not work in wine. I see the following two messages in the wine log after clicking that button
fixme:msvcrt:MSVCRT__sopen : pmode 0x01b6 ignored
File not found
I will continue to add debug flags to wine (and maybe strace the issue) to see what it is that it cannot find.
I also found your ScribblerPerlSource-v1.0.zip and have been looking at this, but it looks like maybe this is the original scribbler code? I didn't see any spin references in it.
Here's another idea: When you press the "View Program" button, the GUI creates a temporary Spin file before it launches the Prop Tool. Maybe you can find and intercept that file. I believe it will be in a folder whose name has "p2x" in it, located in one of your temporary directories. I'm not sure how Wine handles the creation of temporary folders and files, though...
-Phil
With file tracing on, I did find that it was failing on a command that ends with:
... /lib C:\\Program\" Files\\Parallax Inc\\S2 \"v1.3.1/editor /eeprom /gui off C:\\users\\ron\\Temp\\temp.spin > C:\\users\\ron\\Temp\\scribbler.out
This gives me the clue that the spin file it created is C:\\users\\ron\\Temp\\temp.spin, which does indeed exist, and looks like I might be able to use with BST to get this on the scribbler 2.
So I can definitely move forward with this for now, but if you can point me at the code, I may be able to make this work for us wine users in a bit more elegant way than scraping the temp directory for the intermediate file.
Great job on the S2 program, by the way. My 10 year old son was able to "write a program" for the scribbler today and it made our day!
-Ron
-Phil
Did anyone ever get the S2 Program Maker communicating via Com port on a Ubuntu O.S? What was required? I'm running Ubuntu Mint with WINE. The app installs and runs but no comms with the S2.
-JW