newRPL - Updated to build 1510 [official build remains at 1487]

[Claudio L.]

(04-18-2020 04:21 PM)snrowe Wrote:  Hi. Was wondering if there are any plans to implement serial communications. Have a few large programs I wrote in user rpl that use xmit srecv stime buflen to communicate over serial port. If u do implement I would be able to help debug as I'd use these functions often.

Other question is can serial data be sent/recieved as raw strings over usb? If so I might be able to use usb for my application as the program is to control a ham radio that has both a serial and usb cord for control input. It accepts raw strings for commands and returns strings for responses.

I would say not at the moment on serial comms. It would be relatively simple to implement but would be used by very, very few people. Lately I have been overloaded with real world work so feature creep is very low priority. Would've loved to have been forced to quarantine without work to move newRPL forward quickly, but I'm not one of the millions that lost their jobs, I'm among the "lucky" ones that needs to keep going.
Regarding USB... newRPL uses the raw HID protocol so it works without drivers on all known OS's that support USB. And the calculator is a device, not a host so you would still need to connect the calculator to some host (Raspberry PI, Arduino with USB host shield, Teensy, etc.). On top of that, newRPL doesn't send raw strings but calculator objects (if your object is a string, the object is basically a 4 byte prolog then the string, not that hard) and uses a minimalistic way to split objects into HID reports. So your host would have to deal with the raw HID protocol, plus interpret the packets from newRPL in order to get complete objects reassembled and strip the prologs to get the strings.