Linux Support for the Parallax BOE-BOT (Board of Education Robot)

I'm leading a robotics class for the Boys and Girls Club of Collin County on Saturdays. Today I got my BOE-BOT working with Linux over USB! (albeit the interface is still limited to the command line). Here's how I did it:

1) Download the Basic Stamp Tools for Linux from SourceForge

2) Extract to a local directory and make/make install (w/ sudo when necessary)

3) Plug your Boe-Bot into the USB port, and use the "dmesg" command to deterime the correct port. My port was ttyUSBO:

usb 2-3: FTDI USB Serial Device converter now attached to ttyUSB0
usb 2-3: New USB device found, idVendor=0403, idProduct=6001
usb 2-3: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
usb 2-3: Product: FT232R USB UART
usb 2-3: Manufacturer: FTDI
usb 2-3: SerialNumber: A7005rCF

4) Create a symbolic link from your USB port to /dev/bstamp and to the Parallax Tokenizer shared library:

bash-3.2$ sudo ln -s /dev/ttyUSB0 /dev/bstamp

bash-3.2$ sudo cp tokenizer.so /usr/lib/libbstamptokenizer.so

5) Compile, tokenize and transmit your object code to the BS2 microcontroller using these piped commands (the output of the first command is redirected as input to the next command, etc.):

cat filename.bs2 | bstamp_tokenize | bstamp_run


Make sure the BS2 stamp is turned on! Here's the result from "hello.bs2":

bash-3.2$

cat hello.bs2 | bstamp_tokenize | bstamp_run
PBASIC Tokenizer Library version 1.23

Basic Stamp detected!Model: Basic Stamp 2
Firmware version in BCD = 16
18 characters transmitted
18 characters echoed
18 characters transmitted
18 characters echoed
DEBUG OUTPUT: (Press [Control]-[C] to complete sequence)
_____________________________________________________________________
Hello world
^C
_____________________________________________________________________

Received [Control]-[C]!

Shutting down communication!
bash-3.2$



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