Investigation group
Ned Konz
ned at bike-nomad.com
Mon Apr 7 15:14:23 UTC 2003
On Monday 07 April 2003 08:03 am, Sabina A. Schneider wrote:
> We are an investigation group of the University UTN Reginal
> Buenos Aires. We are selecting the new platform for our proyect,
> that's why we are interested in your product. We were investigating
> the characteristics in Internet, but there are very important
> points out of the range: - Is there the posibility to connect to
> the port RC232 and USB through a library of methods, alreay
> implemented?
You don't say what operating system you're using (this is important,
as the Mac serial support has lagged behind the platform). However,
there is the following:
* SerialPort class that allows non-blocking reads (i.e. polling) of
serial ports. You set up all the parameters before opening the port.
I don't think you have direct control over the handshake/status
lines, though. This works under Linux and Windows (and maybe
Windows/CE?). On older Macs (ones with built-in serial ports) you can
use this. On newer Macs, if a serial port doesn't support older MIDI
stuff you can't use it with SerialPort.
* You can use the AsyncFilePlugin for async reads and writes that
block just the Squeak Process (thread) that is doing the reading or
writing. I have written a few new methods for AsyncFile that let you
do this kind of thing easily. However, you don't have control over
the serial port parameters.
* the OSProcess plugin also lets you do async file read/writes.
However, you still can't do the requisite ioctl directly. But you can
run (for instance) a stty call as an external process using
OSProcess. Or you may be able to open the port using SerialPort,
close it, and then open it using the async file methods to set the
parameters.
* there is no *direct* USB support in Squeak. However, depending on
how your USB device presents itself, it may still be usable. For
instance, USB to serial converters can be used with the above
SerialPort support. I've just designed a little microcontroller board
with a USB interface that looks like a serial port (see
http://www.microship.com/bionode); this works with Squeak using the
SerialPort support.
> Is there the possibility to connect with the
> standard X10 through methods already implemented?
Depends on how much of the protocol you want to do yourselves.
Clearly, if you have a serial X10 device and know what bytes to
send/receive from it you can do it.
If you're using Windows and if there is a DLL that controls your X10
device, you may be able to use the FFI (foreign function interface)
support in Squeak to talk with this DLL.
I assume you've already googled for X10 Squeak; this would show you
Kevin Fisher's X10 Driver package at
http://kgf.swiki.net/14 . He uses FFI.
--
Ned Konz
http://bike-nomad.com
GPG key ID: BEEA7EFE
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