[plt-scheme] Reading voltages on a serial port...

On 8/4/06, geb a <geb_a at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Maybe this is way off topic but here goes... What I
> would like to do is to read the voltage of a pin on
> the serial port so that if the pin reads high it
> returns a boolean value (positive or negative logic is
> fine).
>
> Can someone point me in the right direction?  The
> following program yields nothing when run...
>
> (define serial (open-input-file "/dev/ttyS0"))
>
> (define (read-loop in-port)
>   (display (read-line in-port))
>   (newline)
>   (read-loop in-port))
>
> (read-loop serial)

Well, when you open /dev/ttyS0, between your program and the pin is a
device called a UART (Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter),
which is looking for a certain pattern of voltage changes on the pin,
having a specific timing, before it will report anything to you.
Think about the UART as a "parser" for electrical pulses; it's not
going to give you anything via /dev/ttyS0 until it recognizes a
well-formed character.  And you're very unlikely to get anything that
looks like a well-formed character from a real-world voltage source.

You might try the parallel port.  In particular, try the strobe pins
and see if you can't get some sort of sensitivity to level changes.