Chatting to the Picaxe

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RickAlty

Senior Member
While getting acquainted with the Picaxe's there were several occasions when I've wanted to send / receive between the PC and the Picaxe with a little more control than just by using the F8 terminal option in the programming editor, but didn't want to write a specific application just for the one occasion.

To do this, I've written a generic communication app to chat between the PC and the Picaxe. It lets me send data as either a single number or individual digits, with or without a CR after the whole value or after each digit, and displays the received data back into a receive window.

I also made an 'autosend' option for testing things like servo's in which after sending the data, the app waits for a specific reply from the picaxe then sends again, over and over.

Here's a screen shot of the app.....

http://members.aol.com/rickgalty/picchat.jpg

Anyone think of any other usefull features? If anyone wants a copy, just let me know at richard.alty "at" comcast.net

Richard
 
M

MartinM57

Moderator
Looks good...well done!

It's also worth considering Bray's Terminal (http://bray.velenje.cx/avr/terminal/) as it has extensive (and very easy to use) control over the RS232 parameters (including on the fly changes when it's already connected to the COM port - VERY handy for trying to find the real baud rates being used), the ability to switch between hex and ASCII interpretations of the data, simple counts, macros and if you want to be even cleverer, a scripting language of its own...

...and it's freeware as well. Well recommended....
 
kranenborg

kranenborg

Senior Member
Hello,

Very interesting, these posts ...

Am I correct in assuming that you can build for example:

- an i2c eeprom programmer using a very simple picaxe system,

- import text files with simple (space-separated) table formatting (for example obtained through a text file export from MS Excel?

These are applications I long for!
Am I right?

Regards,
Jurjen
http://www.kranenborg.org/ee


Edited by - kranenborg on 18/08/2006 11:38:33
 
B

bdsdsd

New Member
Hi, your program is very interesting. I like have it, but cannot connect to comcast.net. I am stupid spanish. Can you send the program to tejure2@hotmail.com please.THANK YOU VERY MUCH
 
kranenborg

kranenborg

Senior Member
Hello,

I just looked a little bit more one the two solutions, and it does seem to me that you can not do something like open a text file, read an element, send it to the picaxe, read next element from file, send it to the picaxe etc etc. until some terminating character in the file is read.

Does something exist that makes this possible? (Visual Basic? etc)

Could also the scripting possibilities of Bray's terminal (see above) maybe be extended to "open/close file" and "read element" type of operations?

/Jurjen
 
R

RickAlty

Senior Member
Sending the contents of a text file to the picaxe character by character would be something you could do pretty easily in VB - I'll check out that "Bray's Terminal" to see if the scripting could handle it.
 
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