Serial Terminal running TinyBasic

Projects Programming
1

Hello everyone!

I am new to the Arduino game and recently acquired a Brother EP-44 typewriter. It's able to function as an RS232 terminal and I bought an Arduino Uno with hopes of running TinyBasic on it and connecting it to the typewriter using a RX and TX to RS232 converter. I plugged everything in, uploaded TinyBasic edited to use 1200 Baud (the typewriter can run at 110, 300, 600 and 1200 baud, as well as some other settings like 8bit, 7bit and T/W), and the typewriter printed out some random symbols and then nothing happened.

I'm guessing there's something wrong with the code, I have essentially no idea what I'm doing. I would be very grateful if someone could give me some direction :slight_smile:

Someone else did something similar on YouTube but with Lisp:

Heres a copy of the typewriter's manual, the serial information is in Chapter 5:

The code is generic BlueLlama/Tiny Basic but with this:

void setup()
{
#ifdef ARDUINO
  Serial.begin(1200);	// opens serial port
  while( !Serial ); // for Leonardo
  
  Serial.println( sentinel );


#ifdef ENABLE_FILEIO
  initSD();

TinyBasicArduino.pdf (128 KB)

2

Please post the complete sketch or if too big attach it to a post

3

Hello!!
I have attached as a pdf, does it work?

4

Did your simple "hello world" sketch work as expected?

5

looks like all you're trying to do in the posted code is configure the Serial interface and print some string contained in a variable called sentinel. but it looks like the code is incomplete; i don't see what sentinel is set to, don't see a closing brace for set() nor loop()

doesn't the Leonardo/Uno use the Serial interface to program the chip via USB. how can the serial interface be used by both USB and your rs-232 interface at the same time? Do you need to use Software Serial and pins other that 0 & 1?

why would you want to use TinyBasic when you have C++?