It took a while but we're back on track...?

4/7/06 -

I finally got my female to female serial cable and I would like to say that this has helped me procede in my project greatly, but that would be a horrible nasty lie. This bugger had me stumped for quite a while, and even now I feel like I just wasted my time. I had installed BasicX on my computer and also double clicked the registry entry to get the serial port to work, but whenever I tried to get the bx-24 to communicate with my computer it would give me gibberish. I tried flipping the cable around so I would be trying different ports but nothing brought me success. I finally decided that I should test the cable and see which wires went to where: the wires just pass straight through (like a null modem cable). Then I looked up which headers (linked to the pins on the chip) did what using the word document on mycourses. Then I did the same for a standard serial cable using google and figured out which should go to which. I soldered four attached headers to four wires with individual headers on the other end. I pushed the four strip into the correct spot on the board and then the individual pins into the correct holes in the cable. THIS TIME SUCCESS! It welcomed me to the BX-24 and started running the "Hello World" program. I looked up the example code for the green-red LED flasher and using that created my own version of it and tried to comiple and run it to see if that would work as well. This completed as well and soon only green led was flashinbg lopsidedly. I decided at this point that I had had enough for a night and would come back to start doing my own hardwiring and project ideas.