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Subject: 
Re: The pain of communicating with the RCX
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.robotics.rcx.pbforth
Date: 
Thu, 9 Mar 2000 21:11:25 GMT
Viewed: 
5347 times
  
I might be able to help somewhat.  I use my PC running FreeBSD to talk
to my RCX (RIS 1.5).
After much heartache I found that if I used "ecu" as my terminal, it
worked.   I tried everything just to try them, and ecu worked the best.

Ecu is old, but it works:
ftp://ftp.kiarchive.ru/pub/unix/comm/
and supposedly
ftp://tsx-11.mit.edu/pub/linux/sources/usr.bin/Communications/ has it.
There may be rpm's for it, but I don't know.

My setup in ecu is:
tty: /dev/cuaa1 (which on my FreeBSD system is equal to COM 2 in
DOS/WIN)
Full Duplex
2400 Baud
N parity (8 Data bits)

To transfer files to it, I use "echo pacing".  Ralph said it wouldn't
work on big uploads, but it's worked fine for me.

I've never tried to upload a file, but Ralph has a FAQ on how to do it.

I'd say, give ecu a shot and see if it works for you.  Let me know if
you have any questions!

Patrick
----------
Patrick Gardella                 patrick@whetstonelogic.com
VP-Technology                    patrick@freebsd.org
Whetstone Logic, Inc.            This space intentionally left blank.

Ernst de Ridder wrote:
> 
> The power of Forth lies in the ease with which a system can be built and
> and tested both incrementally and interactively. Unfortunately I'm experiencing
> severe difficulties estasblishing a reliable communication channel between my
> PC (Linux) and the RCX (RIS 1.5). I'm hoping you people can help me (and
> others) to annihilate those difficulties, so forth can be used the way it is
> intended to, and not in a compile-with-as and download manner.
> 
> 1) How do you ship forth code as text to the RCX? Downloading an srec file
> is no problem, but when I try to do an ascii download, I always get some
> communication failure somewhere. I tried increasing line and character
> delays up to 200ms and 80ms resp., but although this made the problem less
> frequent it did not cure it. When working interactively comm failures occur
> too, but retyping a single line is not as annoying as trying to reload an
> entire file. Deminishing file size helps a bit, but downloading a single
> tiny file for every word is a pain.
> 
> 2) How can I upload an augmented forth system from the RCX to my PC? I think
> rx (=Receive X-Modem; from the lrzsz package) gets confused by the echo of
> the IR tower: It reports an `025 received error'. This is a NAK in octal.
> Presumably the very NAK rx has sent to initiate the transfer. I found
> an old program called xcomm, which fares a little better. It downloads the
> entire file, but reports a timeout in the end. When I try
> 
> : z S" Hello" ;
> z X-SEND
> 
> and start the transfer by typing ^U, the header and string is transferred,
> then a little pause occurs, and the checksum is sent. I don't see any 0s to
> fill the block to 128 bytes. Doing "0 emit" doesn't give me a 0 either. This
> explains the timeout error, but not why a 0 isn't transmitted. Does the IR
> tower eat them?
> 
> I'm suspecting the IR tower of subversive activities (see how guiltily it
> blinks with its single green eye!), even more so because information gathered
> on the web (in particular Kekoa Proudfoot's page) seems to indicate that it
> was designed to handle only a very restrictive query-answer protocol. This
> would mean every (few) character(s) should be wrapped in an IR-tower packet
> which is subsequently transmitted. This requires of course special software
> on both the PC and the forth side, so the simplicity of using just any
> terminal emulator is gone:(
> 
> Has anybody more information on this, or maybe even (the beginning of) a
> solution?
> 
> Ernst

--



Message is in Reply To:
  The pain of communicating with the RCX
 
The power of Forth lies in the ease with which a system can be built and and tested both incrementally and interactively. Unfortunately I'm experiencing severe difficulties estasblishing a reliable communication channel between my PC (Linux) and the (...) (27 years ago, 9-Mar-00, to lugnet.robotics.rcx.pbforth)

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