Bo Berglund wrote:
I've also replied to you FPC mailing list messages.
This won't answer all of your questions but I hope it will help:
http://www.turbocontrol.com/embeddedfreepascal.htm
Wow! This looks exactly like the product I have been looking around for!
Except their datasheet links are broken so I cannot get detailed info
on the unit. :-(
One particularly important piece of information is the size of the
screen (outside dimensions) so we can see if it will fit into the given
space.
Maybe you have info on this, since you have used it?
I don't have access to the hardware at the moment so I can't help you on
the dimensions. But Technologic Systems is a great company that has
been around for a very long time so I'm sure you can get that info from
them on Monday.
I'd be glad to discuss this in more detail.
Thanks for your offer! I will surely take you on your words and come back
once I have set up a working Lazarus system on both Win XP and Ubunttu so
I can verify that it is indeed possible to talk to our equipment via RS232.
I will use the examples posted here as a starting point for a very simple
comm program to see if I can get the data out of the serial link.
Then I need to dig down deep into the cross-compilation problems for the
target board and then your advice will be vey vluable indeed!
Glad to help as I'm able. The info and code I've posted is my way of
contributing to the FreePascal and Lazarus effort. I would be glad to
see more embedded use. In the near future I'd even like to start using
FreePascal with no OS:
http://wiki.freepascal.org/TARGET_Embedded
I'm also keeping tabs on ToroOS (written with FreePascal) and ReactOS as
those might come in handy for embedded use in the future.
For some serial code, look for "Simple Serial" on this page:
http://www.turbocontrol.com/monitor.htm
I have downloaded it and tried to open it in Lazarus, but there seems not
to be a project file that Lazarus recognizes. :-(
If I try to open the pas file Lazarus offers to create a project for me
but then I don't know what to enter in the following dialogs so I gave
up....
Is it really a Lazarus project at all???
I did a command line compile as directed on the webpage and it produced
an exe file that looks like a console application, so I guess that it
compiles
like that in any case. It listed my two com ports and then ended.
Have to study the "Getting Started" docs for Lazarus to get the basics
in place. Once that is done I hope not much will differ from developing
in Delphi 7 so I can get productive fairly soon...
Those zip files are actually minimal distributions of FreePascal so they
contain the compiler and everything needed to compile the console
application. If the protocol of your device isn't too complicated it
might be easy to modify the program to talk with your device. That
might be worth doing just so you have the serial equivalent of a "hello
world" app that you can try on Windows, Linux desktop, and an embedded
Linux ARM device.
On my "hello world" page I do have a minimal disto with fpGUI and the
FreePascal WinCE cross-compiler. I'd like to release 3 more minimal
distros for fpGUI as those would make it easy to try fgGUI.
I'm not using Lazarus at this time because I think GTK would run too
slow on the slow ARM devices I'm using. Plus, using Lazarus (even with
fpGUI) would probably force me to use a cross-compile environment which
so far I've been able to avoid (except for WinCE).
If I can get an inexpensive ARM device powerful enough to run Lazarus it
might be nice to try using that to compile ARM programs directly without
cross-compiling. Here is something I'm considering but it still looks
under-powered:
http://www.windowsfordevices.com/c/a/News/CVS-Sylvania-netbook/?kc=rss
So many options, so little time... :)
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