On 12-Oct-1999/23:45:55+1:00, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>[REBOL] REBOL and "hw" communication ...
>
>> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>> Date: Fri, 1 Oct 1999 9:15:26 +0100
>
>> is it possible REBOL Technologies will introduce some kind of "hardware"
>> (port) communication protocols? I mean - parallel, serial, usb for e.g.
>>
>> I know it is plaform specific issue
>[...]
>> And as merely every REBOL platform OS knows how to communicate with
>> serial or parallel port, it could be merely multiplatform solution.
>
>If the OS lets you use the serial or parallel port like a file, then you can do
>something right now in a quasi-portable way.
>Amiga OS has a special device named SER: (MS-DOS has COM1: and COM2: ?) and you can do
>
>s: open/direct/binary %/ser
>append s reduce [ "ATZ" (to-char 13) (to-char 10) ]
>
>then 'pick s 1 char at a time, or better user 'read-io
>
>There is a BIG problem however: if you ask more than the chars ready then you'll wait
>forever (maybe 'wait [ s 0 ] will be the answer, but doesn't work right now with
>ports open on files).
>
>Ciao,
>Daniele.
>
>P.S. for Amiga REBOLs: thinking of SER: reminded me of SPEAK: (not so impressive as
>it was 10 years ago, but REBOL could tell us when new mail arrives or a web page is
>changed -- I know, it's platform specific)
Daniele,
Here is a more direct way to do what you want:
s: open/direct/binary %/ser
append s reduce ["ATZ" CRLF]
Also, about the SPEAK: device, I have already used REBOL to do many things with this.
I have the Carnegie-Mellon pronunciation dictionary floating around on my hard drive
here. The original plan was to convert the dictionary to a REBOL HASH block and
then lookup words and get the correct pronunciations for them instead of using the
translator.library. I wrote some code on Blitz Basic a while back that bypassed the
translator.library allowing one to send phonemes directly to the narrator.device, but
unfortunately it doesn't seem to work on 68060-based machines.
The real use I had for this was so my wife could take one of the remote controls
sitting around the house and query the computer to download email and read them to
her while she was doing other things (like cooking, cleaning, taking care of the
kids, giving me a back rub ;) ) The remote control thingy isn't so hard as there
are devices which can be hooked up to Amigas so they can be controlled with any
remote control.
Well, this is barely riding the line of being on-topic, but since the topic was
brought up :)
--
Bohdan "Bo" Lechnowsky
Technical Support / Quality Assurance
REBOL Technologies 707-467-8000 (http://www.rebol.com)
Download the REBOL Messaging Language for all Platforms
