[aklug] Re: Serial Communication - Hardware Flow Control

Which school? I wasn't aware anyone was using Boebots in
anchorage.....
serial control has always been a black art.... and I am not
sure what the doc means either ;=} unless it is describing
a special byte by byte feature of of the microprocessor in
question (one reason I have advocated using old x86 boards
for such projects....)

However, my guess is that based on the quote you provided
hardware flow setting by setting fpin should work, but you
may want to wire via a breakout box to see what is actually
happening ..........

Christopher Howard wrote:
> 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?
>

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Received on Wed Mar 25 14:55:45 2009