Making Debugging Easier

[Astronouth7303]

I always figured it was just standard RS-232 (which it appears to be), though minus a few status lines (fairly common).

[Greg Ross]

Originally Posted by Alan Anderson

Most of the pins on the programming port aren't used. I made a pair of "breakout" connectors that steal pins 7, 8, and 9 from the programming cable and provide remote control of the robot reset and program buttons. The RC end has a "pwm" cable connector for the remote switch pins, and the computer end has a two-way rocker switch with red=RESET and green=PROG sides (though a pair of momentary switches would work too).

Originally Posted by devicenull

Program port pinout is at http://www.ifirobotics.com/docs/program-port-4-7-05.pdf .. pins 9, 4, 6, and 1 are free, I love the IFI support forums

The referenced diagram indicates that pins 7 and 8 (which Alan hijacked for his program and reset buttons) are used! They are RTS and CTS which are used for flow control. Without them, it's (more) likely that your program downloads will fail due to loss of data. I recommend that you use some of the other unused lines rather than 7 and 8.

(BTW, I really like your idea, Alan. I think I will build me one.)

[fowlerm]

Originally Posted by Astronouth7303

On a similar thing, has anyone tried something so that you can change constants w/o downloading code again? I'm thinking that's going to be my summer project.

You can assign each variable a specific address in memory and then use the IFI Loader's DDT (or some other program) to change the value that is stored at that memory location.

[Kyle T]

Originally Posted by Astronouth7303

On a similar thing, has anyone tried something so that you can change constants w/o downloading code again? I'm thinking that's going to be my summer project.

At one point we were using jumpers on the digital inputs on our RC to control which autonomous mode--- using a hex switch (one of those switch panels with 8 tiny switches) one could probably create a mechnaism to input a single byte constant for each eight digital inputs.