Driving a HP plotter from REBOL through RS232

[ADelmotte]

Hello!

I am both learning REBOL and want to use it as soon as possible for some cartographic applications.

I'd like to drive an HP7550Plus plotter which is linked to COM1.

I did find some information from the book of Olivier Auverlot, but I can not get it to work!

First I would just like to replicate the BASIC program below which works from a command prompt window under Windows 98 (quickbasic).

I would work either from Windows 98 or Windows XP; on both machines the com1 port is defined as
baud: 9600
bits: 8
parity: none
stop bit: 1
handshaking: hardware

Thanks for the help.

Alain Delmotte

here is the BASIC program

Code:

OPEN "COM1:9600,S,8,1,RS,CS65535,DS,CD" FOR RANDOM AS #1
PRINT #1, "IN;OI;"
Input #1, ID$
PRINT #1, "SP1;PA 500,500;"
PRINT #1, "LB"; ID$; " COMMUNICATION OK"; CHR$(3)
PRINT #1, "PA 0,0;SP0;"
END

[PeterWood]

Alain

These documents may help:

http://www.rebol.com/docs/changes.html#section-6.3
http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/ml-display-thread.r?m=rmlGVZS
http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/ml-topic-index.r?i=ports

Somethink like this should work:

ser: open/no-wait serial://    ;; open serial port with default values
                                           ;; defaults match the settings in your message


insert ser data-Alain             ;; push you data into the port buffer
update ser                           ;; flush the port buffer

close ser                              ;; close the port when finished (automatically flushes)

I couldn't test because I have no serial devices.

You could also look at the open/direct refinement which opens the port without a buffer.
(see the Rebol function dictionary - http://www.rebol.com/docs/words/wopen.html )

Hope this helps.

Peter




Something like this should work:

ser: open/direct/no-wait serial://

[ADelmotte]

Peter,

Thanks for the information; I'll have a look and, surely, some tries.

Regards,

Alain

[Graham]

If you can develop a PCL dialect to send commands to the plotter, we could use it for general printing purposes