Weird Output from Dashboard Port

[Ian W.]

Originally Posted by Astronouth7303

DID YOU READ THE DOC? The bytes aren't ASCII, That's for the Prog port on the bot. I would try outputting the bytes (Translate to Hex string) as which # in the packet. That may solve problems. And what language are you using?

Yes, I've read the documents, I've read all of them, actually, from 2000 to 2004, in hopes of finding answers. In fact, none of the ports on the OI or RC talk in ASCII, they all talk in hex. It'd make no sense for computers to talk using ASCII, as ASCII was made for displaying characters and such for humans to understand, not microprocessors.

I'm using C/C++ with VS.net.

As for the problems I was having, I actually found the solution by accident.

Apparently I had done something bad with the serial port, forgot to close it, I think, or closed the program incorrectly so it didn't get a chance to close. Due to this, I was unable to correctly reopen it, and that created garbage data. A simple reboot, while 5 minutes long (I'm using an old PII laptop trying to run Win2k), fixed the problem.

If anyone knows how to close an opened serial port after the program that opened it has aborted, can you please share? That would save me, and probably plenty of others, a bunch of time in the pits .

And, as a message of help to everyone, if you ever have strange problems with your serial port, just reboot, don't waste an entire day on it .