Re: Help with pic over usb

Hi Anne,

Anne Vanhoest wrote:
> terminal emulator [BV-Com.exe] and the connection to the pic was
> done, then he could load and run his programs. The programs are
> written in "ByVac" Basic.

How exactly were programs loaded using BV-Com?

From your description it seems to me that the board is more or less
permanently running a ByVac BASIC interpreter on the PIC, and that
the actual program code flashed into the PIC never really changes.


> The board is provided by ByVac, and they said there should be
> no problem with linux, that any terminal emulator would do.  But
> how do I get "any terminal emulator" to connect to the virtual com
> port?

That depends on the particular terminal emulator.

First, in order for there to be a virtual serial port device that is
emulated by using USB, the Linux kernel must recognize the USB part
of the board, and must have a driver for it. There are many common
ways to make this work fine. You can do two fairly simple tests:

Start the Linux system with the PIC board disconnected. Open any
command line interface. Connect the USB cable to the PIC board.
Then run:

dmesg | tail -n 40

And/or:

ls -l /dev/ttyUSB*

The former shows messages from the kernel, and should mention that a
new USB device was connected, and if it was recognized then also
which /dev/ttyUSB device it has been assigned.

Next step is to choose a program to communicate with the board. The
so-called terminal emulator. There are likely some requirements on
this program, but since then vendor could not clearly specify them
you're pretty much left to discover that on your own.

I have used minicom a lot, but lately have switched to more
lightweight alternatives such as picocom and/or xc. These are all
CLI based programs. Maybe there is also a GUI based one in Fedora and
Ubuntu.

Simply start the program with the serial port device as parameter.

minicom /dev/ttyUSB0


Best of luck

//Peter