[aklug] Serial Communication - Hardware Flow Control

Hi. I'm still working on that robot project at school, and I had another
question about serial communication.
The idea is to connect the robot, a Boe-Bot with a Bstamp processor and an
eb500 bluetooth module, to a PC via Bluetooth and send data from the PC to
the robot over Bluetooth using Bluetooth serial emulation.

We accomplished that. However, now I would like do the same communication,
but with hardware flow control. (I won't bore you with the details, but
basically we need flow control because the lame Bstamp processor does not
have multi-tasking capabilities.)

The manuals for the robot and the Bluetooth module provide some
information about flow-controlled communication between two robots, but
when they talk about communication between a PC and a robot, they state
this (while discussing the robot programming commands SERIN and SEROUT):

"These limitations [caused by the lack of multi-tasking capabilities] can
sometimes be addressed by using flow control; the Fpin option for SERIN
and SEROUT (at baud rates of up to the limitation shown in Table 5.94).
Through Fpin, SERIN can tell a BASIC Stamp sender when it is ready to
receive data. (For that matter, Fpin flow control follows the rules of
other serial handshaking schemes, but most computers other than the BASIC
Stamp cannot start and stop serial transmission on a byte-by-byte basis.
That¢s why this discussion is limited to communication between BASIC Stamp
modules.)"

The vague part to me is the phrase: "most computers other than the BASIC
Stamp cannot start and stop serial transmission on a byte-by-byte basis".
Do you guys now anything about that? So if I set my PC terminal to
hardware flow control (CTS/RTS) does it try to send a certain number of
bytes each time before checking the flow control line, or what?

-- 
Christopher Howard
http://indicium.us
http://theologia.indicium.us
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