It's a bitch.
Even at slow rates, you'll find yourself ripping your hair out at the unresponsiveness of old serial interfaces. Many of them run without handshaking of any kind. Sometimes the connections fail and you have to restart both the target machine and the computer. You'll find yourself padding commands with delays just to get stuff to work.
And if you don't know the right commands, you could be out of luck.
One thing I might suggest is that you hook up the machine with it's regular controller, but tap the send line with a breakout box and attempt to view the commands that are sent with a terminal program (instead of Rev for now). If echo is set on the target device you should see both ends of the 'conversation'. This will give you a start.
After that testing commands using a terminal program rather than rev will speed up your development. Sometimes people who write the imbedded software for controllers will put in a help menu - try sending an "H" to the controller.
And if you have to develop this thing with your dad in the room, it will take forever. What you need is your own machine on your own bench to do this in your own time. I've found that working at a distance is almost impossible with this kind of project.
Plan on spending a LOT of time on this one. The REV interface will be the fun and easy part.
good luck
sqb
Hi Dar, Sarah and all,
Developing this stack is a bit complicated, as I need to write it in my office, compile it and then test it in the company of my father. I got the manual of the machine today but have not found any useful hints on communication with a PC.
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