Page 56 - The Definitive Guide to Building Java Robots

Preston_5564C02.fm Page 37 Wednesday, September 14, 2005 5:42 AM

CHAPTER 2 ■ SERIAL COMMUNICATION 37

Section Summary

You should now be able to connect to the serial port on your robot from any place in the world.
You can write your programs at your PC and as long as you have network connectivity to the
serial port on your robot, all the programs can be run from your PC.
The classes and JSP I introduced in this section were

• WebSerialPort: The class that accesses the serial port on the web server for the JSP.
• Webcom.jsp: The Java Server Page that provides access from the WebSerialPort to the
WebSerialClient, or direct access via the browser.
• WebSerialClient: The class that implements the JSerialPort interface which allows access
to a serial port on a web server the same way you can access a serial port on your local
machine.
Depending on your configuration, you’re ready to start accessing your microcontroller via
your serial port.

2.4 Serial Communications with a Microcontroller

Once you have thoroughly tested and used some of the classes accessing your PC’s serial port,
you’re ready to send and receive some data with it. To do this, connect the serial cable from
your PC to your Parallax Board of Education. You can see in Figure 2-5 that the BOE has a spot
for either the BASIC or Javelin Stamp, connectors for a serial cable, battery, and bread board for
use in experimentation.

Figure 2-5. The Parallax Board of Education