Several years back in my college days I had a course where we would make projects out of a Parallax Stamp II. For anyone that does not know what these little things are they should check out the Paralax website here.
Part of the reason I stopped playing around with my Stamp II after school was the lack of Linux support for it at the time. I have since pulled it out of a dust box this evening and am happy to say it still works. Below are the steps I took to actually getting a working environment for it on my Thinkpad T61 running Ubuntu 9.04.
First as with most modern computers of today I don’t seem to have a serial port on my laptop. I picked up a cheap $14 usb to serial cable at the local computer shop. And went to work getting it working in linux.
Plug in your new usb to serial cable and open up a terminal window.
Type lsusb
You should see something along the lines of what is below. I have highlighted the important part. Please note that your brand of usb to serial cable will prob say something completely different, but it should be labeled well enough to let you know what it is.
Bus 003 Device 003: ID 0483:2016 SGS Thomson Microelectronics Fingerprint Reader
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 0a5c:2110 Broadcom Corp. Bluetooth Controller
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 007 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 004 Device 002: ID 067b:2303 Prolific Technology, Inc. PL2303 Serial Port
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 001 Device 010: ID 046d:c50e Logitech, Inc. MX-1000 Cordless Mouse Receiver
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 05af:0802 Jing-Mold Enterprise Co., Ltd
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 04b3:4485 IBM Corp.
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Next we need to find out where the device is located on the sysem. To do this type the below command in the terminal:
dmesg
Some where near the bottom of the mass amounts of output should be something like this. Again I have highlighted the important section. The info we actually want is the ttyUSB0
[ 64.937214] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): eth0: link becomes ready
[ 69.252073] usb 4-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 2
[ 69.411191] usb 4-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[ 69.454660] USB Serial support registered for pl2303
[ 69.454690] pl2303 4-1:1.0: pl2303 converter detected
[ 69.466202] usb 4-1: pl2303 converter now attached to ttyUSB0
[ 69.466215] usbcore: registered new interface driver pl2303
[ 69.466217] pl2303: Prolific PL2303 USB to serial adaptor driver
We now have a working usb to serial interface and need to find some software to write some sample code in and test transferring the code over to the Stamp II.
You can get the packages we will need at Parallaxs website under the downloads section here.
The Two files we are looking for are PBASIC Editor for Linux part 1 and part 2. Part 1 is pbcompiler.tgz and Part 2 has the library files we will need to communicate. Download and extract both these files in your home directory.
tar -zxvf pbcompiler.tgz
tar -zxvf lib.tgz
Next we need to move a file over to another location of the system.
cd lib
sudo cp * /usr/lib
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libborqt-6.9.0-qt2.3.so /usr/lib/libborqt-6.9-qt2.3.so
Lastly we need to tell the software about the location of the serial port. In the directory PBcompiler/bin/ is a file called config.dat. Open this file in your favorite text editor and change the line.
/dev/ttyS0
to
/dev/The_device_found_above
In my case I would replace the /dev/ttyS0 with /dev/ttyUSB0 which I found when running the dmesg command earlier. Save the file and we are now ready to run the program.
For some reason one of the Bugs in the release notes of the program is that it will not run from console and you need to run it from in gnome or kde. So fire up Nautilus and goto PBcompiler/bin/ Double click on the PBasic Application and start coding.
