Communication between COM1, 2, etc. and a Boe-Bot

JKL Tech

Is there any way currently avaliable to transmit data to a Boe Bot from a COM1, 2, etc.
We are looking for a way to build an alternative editor and tokenizer for the BS2.
(A tokenizer engine/library we still have to find)

Thanks

-The JKL Tech team

(Edit: Would this be a good tokenizer for a multiple OS? We are currently developing
the software on a Linux and Windows Interface.)

Tom Walker

JKL,
See my response in the last thread...

http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?p=569707



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Truly Understand the Fundamentals and the Path will be so much easier...

Post Edited (Tom Walker) : 2/8/2006 2:19:21 PM GMT

allanlane5

1. You don't even say what OS, language, or platform your tokenizer is intended to run on. What's a ".shlb" file?

2. Parallax HAS written a tokenizer for their PBasic language already. Perhaps you can 'port' that?

3. The BS2 is programmed in PBasic 'tokens', which is read by a PBasic 'engine' programmed into the 16C54 PIC chip on the BS2. It has 2000 bytes of EEPROM 'token' storage, and 26 bytes of RAM.

It is VERY good at 'slow' real-time tasks -- on the order of tens of milliseconds. It is NOT very good at high-speed data throughput, or multi-tasking at a sub-millisecond rate. If you can live with those limitations (and LOTS of people do, all the time) it's a wonderful platform.

4. Re-programming it on-the-fly is quite possible. Parallax has published the specifications on their web-site. Why you would want to, and what you achieve by doing so, and how valuable the result would be, is debateable. But I believe the resources are there.

5. Oh, and you can communicate with the on-board serial port easily. From the BS2 side, it's:

SERIN 16, 16384, [noparse][[/noparse]DEC MyVar]

SEROUT 16, 16384, [noparse][[/noparse]"Hi!", 13]

And I assume you know how to open a serial port from the PC, assign a 9600 baud rate to it, and send and recieve data.

Jon Williams

Parallax has·precompiled BS2-family·tokenizer modules for the Mac and for Linux -- they are precompiled because the contain our intellectual property and we do not release that (and no, we will not consider an NDA on this topic).· You can find them and instructions for linking into your projects on this page:

http://www.parallax.com/html_pages/downloads/tokenizer/tokenizer.asp

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Jon Williams
Applications Engineer, Parallax

JKL Tech

"1. You don't even say what OS, language, or platform your tokenizer is intended to run on. What's a ".shlb" file?"

We are currently developing it under Windows with Liberty BASIC (http://www.libertybasic.com) and Linux
with C. A *.shlb file is a linux program extention file, just like a DLL for Windows.

allanlane5

Ah, thanks, didn't mean to be difficult. My other comments still apply, however. Since the PBasic 'engine' inside the BS2 only knows how to interpret 'PBasic' tokens, whatever tokenizer you come up with will still have to generate PBasic tokens. You might as well use the Parallax tokenizer as the simplist interface.