Have you ever wanted to control your QuickStart Board from Windows? Have you ever wanted to be able to see the status of your I/O and other data within a Windows Application? QuickStart Communicator shows how you can set up a serial communication protocol over USB that can send control information from the Windows App as well as display I/O and other status from the QuickStart Board, including reading the touch buttons and showing the LED status.
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Granz
These articles (this one and “Visual BASIC Communicator”) are really interesting to me. I have been wanting to do something like this with AVR (and Arduino) controllers (plus I have a few Propeller boards which could use this.) What I want to do with this is to set up a PC with one, or more, controllers and have a BASIC program control it (them.) The intelligence of a PC running a higher level language, along with the “muscles” of the microcontroller. Plus getting around the necessary stupidity of modern OSs blocking direct access to the I/O ports.
I look forward to seeing your final write-ups.
Granz
Is this based on AN018 (https://www.parallax.com/package/an018-communication-with-a-pc-application/)? Were you the one who wrote that Application Note?
Chris Savage
Granz, yes, I wrote the VB Communicator as a tutorial on Micro / PC communication. Then it was suggested I use the QuickStart Board, since it already had the touch buttons and LEDs on it. So, I re-wrote the tutorial into a project that was converted to an AppNote.