Subject:
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Re: (Slightly Offtopic:) WinAmp remote control via IR Tower
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.robotics.rcx
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Date:
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Thu, 17 Feb 2000 23:17:46 GMT
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Viewed:
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1805 times
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In lugnet.robotics.rcx, Lee Gibson writes:
> Well! A kind soul pointed me to:
>
> http://henrik.husted.net/winamp.htm
>
> which has a neat Winamp plugin that allows the program to be controlled by the
> serial port. Now I just need to convince the IR tower to play nice with
> others. The plugin tries to open Com 2 (where my tower's plugged in), but
> Windows says the port's in use. Normally, I'd say that some other app's using
> the com port, but there's nothing (except Mindstorms, which is not active) on
> my computer that talks to the com port. No fax programs, no serial mice,
> nuthin'. Just the IR tower.
>
> Couple general questions.
> Does Mindstorms have some sort of TSR that "owns" the com port the IR tower is
> attached to?
Mindstorms uses an ActiveX control called SPIRIT.OCX to communicate with the
IR tower. As far as I know, it only opens the COM port when some application
is actually using the .OCX, so the port should be available for use if you're
not running the LEGO software. (Beware that LEGO has documented how to use
SPIRIT.OCX, so other "freeware" RCX programs may also try to use it.)
> What communications parameters does the tower use? 8N1?
I believe that the IR tower uses 2400,n,8,1 although I'm quoting this from
memory. Definitely 2400 baud, though.
The bigger problem that you will likely encounter is that the IR tower only
"listens" for incoming IR for about three seconds after each outgoing
transmission. (The green LED on the front of the tower goes out when the
tower shuts down.) So if you want to use the LEGO IR tower to continuously
monitor for incoming communications, you must periodically transmit at least
one byte every couple of seconds. Unfortunately, this is likely to interfere
with any incoming data that you might be waiting for.
Many have tried to overcome this severe limitation of the IR tower without any
success that I've heard of. I've personally tried a number of software hacks
(toggling CTS/RTS and the other RS-232 control lines) without any luck. It
seems that you need to send actual data through the tower to keep it alive.
For more background on this subject, search the LUGNET archives for the phrase
"keeping the tower alive". (I think this discussion might have been going on
under the LegOS group, but I could be wrong.)
> Do there exist raw serial port data displays, so I can see whether or not I'm
> getting any input at all from the serial port?
Any terminal program should be able to do this for you. If you can't find
something that will work for you, somewhere I have an old serial port monitor
program that I wrote that will display raw hex bytes coming from a serial
port. Send me some e-mail if you want me to try to dig this up for you.
I hope this information isn't too discouraging to you. Good luck!
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