Scribbler2 SCB to spin?

ronlawrence3

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...

Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)

If the included Propeller Tool also runs under Wine, you might be able to click on the "View Program" icon in the menu bar (arrow pointing to notepad) to view it, and then to save the converted Spin file from the Prop Tool.

-Phil

ronlawrence3

Wow, fast reply!

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.

Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)

Yes, the source zip is for the Scribbler 1. I've not yet prepared a source zip for the S2 GUI.

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

ronlawrence3

Replying to my own post...

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.

ronlawrence3

Phil,

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 Pilgrim (PhiPi)

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!

Thanks, Ron! That makes my day, too; and it's what makes the effort worthwhile!

-Phil

2541sun

Hi,
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