SerialComm

As I've explained in my comment in The Register's article about HPCs, I'm back to the HPC community and I've decided to start developing some programs as a way to revive my love for this awesome community. My first contribution has to do with a project that I've started which involves RS-232 and a Arduino, so to make prototyping a lot simpler I decided to build a simple serial communication and debugging application, since I didn't like ZTerm for simple testing.

Firstly I decided to build the application using PocketC and after a lot of frustrating moments with it I got to a point where it was practically finished, just required a bit of polishing to release as you can see from this screenshot:



But PocketC just felt like a huge hack and it's extremely difficult to do anything good/professional with it, so I decided to rewrite it using something better. If you're interested I've attached the source files for the PocketC version in this post.

Although I do a lot of C++ (as you can see by my GitHub profile), I just couldn't wrap my head around eVC++, so I decided to go with eVB, and this is what I was able to build in 4 days (while having to almost relearn VB):





I hope you like it and please make sure to leave some feedback of things that you think should be changed, errors, or bug reports. Also, if you have any kind of application that you would like to see me build, please let me know here or via PM.

I've attached the a ZIP file of the release. Just extract it and put it anywhere you like in your HPC, but don't forget that all those files have to be in the same directory (feel free to delete the executables for other CPU architectures). I also want to point out that this is a fully open source project so you can grab all the files from its GitHub repo.

Edited by nathanpc 2014-04-03 7:41 PM

Very cool and nice work!

Would you be happy for us to put your apps into the SCL?

I've done some stuff with the eVB serial control, I had problems with delay and buffer overrunning, so had to introduce methods of creating channel delay and buffering, which was interesting. It's amazing what you can do with supposedly "incapable" languages with the application of a little science.

I would love to have it added to the SCL. About the serial control problems you've described, I still haven't had any problems with it, but I'll test it more thoroughly, thanks very much for pointing it out.

I was quite amazed at the kinds of things that you can do with eVB. I was expecting it to be a lot more limited.

Edited by nathanpc 2014-04-03 10:22 PM

Very cool! Makes me want to go back to my old computer and develop in eVB again! That was the first programming language I learned lol.

You can now download this from the SCL:
http://www.hpcfactor.com/scl/details.asp?id=1001

Cool. I'll download it right away.