Allright, here it is, my terminal - that is what it looks like, @johnsondavies ! :)
I sent you a friend invitation in Facebook, too, should this somehow not be visible.
Brother EP-44 + uLisp
That’s really cool! I didn’t realise you could use a Brother typewriter as a serial terminal. Pity you can’t still buy them.
By the way, if you want uLisp to be case-insensitive, make the following two changes:
-
In
builtin(): changestrcmp_Ptostrcasecmp_P -
In
longsymbol(): changestrcmptostrcasecmp
That should solve the problem with ‘T’ not being recognised as true.
Aeneas
#3
Thank you very much! I think the problem would never have shown up had I not decided THAT I WANT IT ALL CAPS LIKE IN THE OLD DAYS WHEN NOBODY HAD THE MONEY FOR SMALLER LETTER. :)
I am actually facing now a strange, different problem: the new uLisp version (2.3) no longer talks with the typewriter over the serial port. Given that I have cloned DUEs only, it will take me a while to figure it out, but 1.9 works just fine.
As to typewriters… well, there’s always ebay, of course. If you entertain the idea, let me tell you what I found out:
-
Mega 2560 are super-nice, even the cloned ones work really well; DUE are terribly capricious, sometimes the serial port working only one direction;
-
Typewriters are treacherous and tricky: Brother EP 44 works, so does Brother TC 600, and I suspect also Brother WP 600 as well as Wang WP 600 (I did NOT yet test these last two); Brother EP 22 and a lot of others do NOT work - they have “print only” functionality, but cannot send input (yeah, same port, same brand, same series, DIFFERENT functionality…). Not all terminals work, either - I found out, Texas Instruments Silent 703 are normally very “nice” (also DB 25 serial port), but I did NOT get them to work with Arduinos. Good luck! :) EDIT: The Brother EP 44 and TC 600 have one advantage: they can work without ribbons, just on standard thermal paper. This solves the supplies problem which people with Decrwriters and Selectrics face.
I am actually facing now a strange, different problem: the new uLisp version (2.3) no longer talks with the typewriter over the serial port. Given that I have cloned DUEs only, it will take me a while to figure it out, but 1.9 works just fine.
That’s worrying - someone else has reported the same problem.
Please can you clarify - when you say “the new uLisp version (2.3) no longer talks with the typewriter over the serial port”, does that apply to the AVR version of uLisp 2.3 on the ATmega2560, or just the ARM version of uLisp 2.3 on the Arduino Due?
By the way, I have a cloned Arduino Due and it seems to work fine with uLisp 2.3.
Aeneas
#5
I tested only with the Due, as only the floating point would have mattered to me. - And yes, it “works”, but it works over USB. - Mine does not work if trying to handle a serial port over pins. I am actually thinking, when I have the time, of step-by-step down-grading the code for the serial port and see what changes are needed.
If you find anything let me know. In the meantime I’ll have a look at the differences between 1.9 and 2.3 and see if I can spot anything that might be causing it.
I’ve tested uLisp 2.3 on my Arduino Due clone, communicating to it via the Mac Terminal as described in:
and it seems to work fine. Please could you confirm whether that works on 2.3?
Aeneas
#8
Dear @johnsondavies ,
I used both picocom and the typewriter, and it does not work properly on either (with a serial port attached to TX0, RX0, 5V or 3.3V and GND). What it does is, after a reset it properly greets you, but it does not react on anything at all that you type. It cannot RECEIVE characters, though it prints them fine on startup. I tried with a Sainsmart Due, too - same result.
