[vox] BASIC Stamp under Linux

[Bill Kendrick]

BTW, I dropped by Brian Lavender's place yesterday, and noticed a BASIC Stamp
sitting on his desk.  I ended up hanging out for a few hours and working on
the code with him, and we got his Linux box talking to it sucessfully!

I then stayed up way too late last night cleaning up the code some.
It's online here:  (We'll be setting up a SourceForge project soon)

  http://www.saclug.org/projects/bstamp/


It uses the 'tokenizer.so' shared library from Parallax (binary only)
to tokenize the PBASIC.  The tokenizer application is just their
"stampapp.cpp" source, scaled down so that it doesn't display 1000s of lines
of uninderesting gibberish, but rather just dumps the final results to a file.

Then the "run" program we made talks to the serial port, does some initial
communications with the BASIC Stamp (this part's still incomplete; it only
recognizes BS2 models, at the moment, since that's what Brian has),
and sends the program over.

The stamp then begins running it, and the "run" program listens for any
feedback from the serial port (e.g., PSTAMP code like "DEBUG "Hello!", CR"
which is akin to "printf("Hello!\n");" in C).


We successfully got it saying "Hello World" and blinking an LED light on and
off.  It's a great leap from "can't use it with Linux" ;^)


-- 
bill@newbreedsoftware.com                                            Hire me!
http://newbreedsoftware.com/bill/    http://newbreedsoftware.com/bill/resume/