Well, I have taught myself to program the Uno, and now have a nice little project working to control speed of a DC motor using all my own code.
BUT, I am a dummy at how computers communicate over USB! I can do the basics like using Serial.print to communicate with the board via the USB port using the built in IDE monitor.
First question: is there a way to send a character from my PC on a single key press, ie without the carriage return? The idea is to use + and - keys to wind up and down a variable in the sketch, and display the value on the monitor, without using carriage return.
Second question: Is there another way to communicate directly with the Uno USB port without having an IDE installed, using some sort of terminal or emulator, if so please suggest something I can use and how to set it up, pref in Windows (eg could I use hyperterminal which I have on XP but not on my W8 laptop) ?
yendis:
First question: is there a way to send a character from my PC on a single key press, ie without the carriage return? The idea is to use + and - keys to wind up and down a variable in the sketch, and display the value on the monitor, without using carriage return.
You have to use a carriage return with the Arduino's terminal.
Someone suggested Putty (think that's how it's spelled) when I asked a similar question.
The "Parallax Serial Terminal.exe" (PST) can also be used to directly enter characters. I use PST with other projects so I haven't looked at the other terminal software options.
OK. I somehow managed to get hyperterminal to work but it only made sense once I had connected the Uno and a com port number appeared. Then I set the basic parameters (no of bits etc) and now I get a string of characters after each key press.
At least something is happening now. I would hope to be able to write some code in the Uno to read and write something meaningful.
I put together my own serial terminal program using Visual Basic Express 2010. VB is easy to use and set up for less complicated tasks such as sending a command to increase or decrease a counter or whatever on the Arduino. If you or anyone else is interested let me know.
yendis:
First question: is there a way to send a character from my PC on a single key press, ie without the carriage return? The idea is to use + and - keys to wind up and down a variable in the sketch, and display the value on the monitor, without using carriage return.
For that sort of thing I would write a short PC program (I would use Python, but any PC language would do) that takes in the key presses and sends appropriate messages to the Arduino.
The advantage of a special PC program is that (among other things) it formalizes the relationship between what you are doing on the PC and what happens on the Arduino. Using a terminal program works, but it gives the appearance of something that was just thrown together for a test.
