Published July 2001

FINE TUNING AN EMBEDDED IDEA

Part 1: The Land of BL2000
by Fred Eady

Start • Z-World’s BL2000 • C Me… • Lock and Load • Acquire the Voltage Data • Transport and Display the Voltage Data • Just the Beginning • Sources and PDF

C ME…

If you said, "Who?," you’re on the beam. The header for this section is what Roger Daltry of The Who sang so gracefully about in "Pinball Wizard," the epic rock opera. Roger’s lyric, "See me" was pointed at a blind pinball-playing youth. My "C me" version refers to 7.04P3 of Dynamic C Premier.

After connecting the programming cable to the Z-World BL2000 and applying power, I flipped in my latest CD version of Dynamic C Premier and let the AMD Thunderbird and company do their PC install software thing. After getting the programming cable attached correctly (I completely missed the back row of pins not once but three times), the Z-World BL2000 was found by the Dynamic C Premier initialization code and all was well until…a Windows message box popped up telling me that a hexadecimal 0x00 was received instead of an ACK or NAK.

As a telecommunications type, I inferred that something was strange in the communication between my T-bird serial interface and the Z-World BL2000. Hmm…So, I picked up the phone and dialed up the Z-World technical support desk. Less than 90 s later, I had a solution. It seems that some PC serial ports need the two-stop bit setting instead of the default one-stop bit setting at high speeds (115,200 bps, in my case). To save some of you a call to Z-World tech support, I’m running an ASUS A7A266 under the T-bird.

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