serin trouble with PIC16F877A

[thasatelliteguy]

Man! I know this has to be something crazy simple to fix. This was the basis of my very first PIC project 6 weeks ago when I used a PICaxe 20M2 to build a BT controlled tank to pull wire under houses. It worked beautifully! But alas, PICAXE is a lil different from PBP, and I wiped the bootloader from that chip as soon as I got my picKIT3. It sux too cuz I want my tank running again and I cant do that either until I solve this same issue.......

[EarlyBird2]

Man! I know this has to be something crazy simple to fix. This was the basis of my very first PIC project 6 weeks ago when I used a PICaxe 20M2 to build a BT controlled tank to pull wire under houses. It worked beautifully! But alas, PICAXE is a lil different from PBP, and I wiped the bootloader from that chip as soon as I got my picKIT3. It sux too cuz I want my tank running again and I cant do that either until I solve this same issue.......

I agree with you it has to be something simple.

Cut down the program to the bare minimum and test.

#CONFIG
 __config _FOSC_HS & _WDT_OFF & _PWRTE_ON & _BODEN_ON & _LVP_OFF & _CPD_OFF & _WRT_OFF & _DEBUG_OFF & _CP_OFF
 #ENDCONFIG

 DEFINE OSC 12

 TX var PORTC.6
 RX var PORTC.7

 cereal var byte
 i var byte
 
 For i = 0 to 30
 serout TX, 2, [10]
 next i
 
 MainMenu:
  serout Tx, 2, ["******** MAIN MENU ********", 13, 10, 10]
 serout Tx, 2, [" 1. Start Homing Sequence", 13, 10]
 serout Tx, 2, [" 2. Manual JOG Mode", 13, 10]
 serout Tx, 2, [" 3. Auto-Acquire Satellite", 13, 10]
 serout Tx, 2, [" 4. Stow Dish for Travel", 13, 10, 10]
 serout Tx, 2, ["Enter Your Selection:", 13, 10]
  Serin RX, 2, 500, MainMenu, cereal

  serout TX, 2, [cereal] 'For debugging only
 serout TX, 2, ["Dingleberry"]
 goto MainMenu

[EarlyBird2]

I do not understand how you are getting [00]Dingleberry surely it should be 00Dingleberry.

[Amoque]

Your comment about getting "[00]Dingleberry" makes me wonder...

Why would you get two zeros? Your not formatting "cereal" with DEC - or any qualifier. Perhaps you should; perhaps you are getting an ASCII non printing character "printed" to your output (a non-printing character of ASCII value 1 for example)? It seems to me that somewhere, something is happening as the 00 is coming from somewhere.

You might also try adding a cereal = 65 prior to MainMenu; if you get an "A", then you'll know the serial input is getting nothing in the loop. If you don't... then something is changing the value...

[EarlyBird2]

Amoque,

I really do not understand the []. Where do they come from?

[Amoque]

Amoque,

I really do not understand the []. Where do they come from?

I don't know... I was quoting the OP. If the output is a direct quote, there is much about it I don't understand. Why TWO zeros (in addition to the brackets)? PicBasic doesn't default to double digit display; perhaps the subroutine fails and runs through another subroutine or the WDT causes a second response. Perhaps the brackets were only added for clarity.

For myself, I think that I'd:

1) Set a default value for Cereal, so as to know it was changed (or not).
2) Extend the timeout so that I could be sure that no amount of key-banging elicited an input.
3) Format the output as DEC or BIN so as to standardize the output.