How do i send serial commands to USB mosquit I/O board?

[R0B0T]

I recently bought a "Mosquit-IO" board from Trossen Robotics:

http://www.trossenrobotics.com/Mosquit-IO.aspx

It says all to do to control the servos plugged into the board is to send a command like:

255 25 42 69 25 42 69 /r

Where commands are sent at: 19200 baud, 8 bits , no parity, 1 stop bit, with RTS/CTS handshaking enabled.

I am trying to write a code to send these commands, but not having success talking with the board.  I am also just trying, using the "Basic Serial Write and Read" example from LabVIEW.  I'm even having no success with the example.  I believe if I can get labview's example to work, I can get my code to work.

When I send the commands on the "Basic Serial Write and Read" example, the command:

 255 25 42 69 25 42 69 /r

it turns into:

 255\s42\s69\s25\s42\s69\s25\s/r

but the servos do not move.

Can anyone help out?  

Thanks

[Jochen · Accepted solution]

Hi,

I think you are mixing up data formats here. I guess that the you shouldn't send the ASCII string "255 25 42 69 25 42 69 /r" here, but the numbers represent byte values. E. g. the number 255 represents the maximum value of one byte, but if you put this value into a string and send it to your device, you effectively send three bytes with the values 50 (= ASCII value for the character "2"), 53 (= ASCII "5") and 53 (= ASCII "5"). /r is the symbol for carriage return which equals to a byte value of 13.

The best way to create your command string is to use a byte array (U8) and convert it into a string.

The string is not human readable, but it represents the byte values of your commands.

I hope this helps,

Jochen Klier

National Instruments

[R0B0T]

Awesome!  Thank you so much!  The servos work now.