I have to handle a chain of four motors using a serial port. The user manual indicates that during initialization I need to send (for example) the strings
Z
1ECHO
2ECHO
3ECHO
4ECHO
And tells me to do that, in a code I do not recognize, with commands
PRINT(#128, "Z", #13)
PRINT(#129, "ECHO", #13)
PRINT(#130, "ECHO", #13)
PRINT(#131, "ECHO", #13)
PRINT(#132, "ECHO", #13)
To explain this, the manual also adds a sentence I do not understand:
with the strings above you can initialize the motors via the motors software but a host program have to send the same commands with different prefix: 0, 1, 2, 3 and 4 are in fact 0x80, 0x81, 0x82, 0x83 and 0x84, respectively. The decimal equivalents of hexadecimal values are 128, 129, 130, 131 and 132.
A colleague wrote a working code in Visual Basic as follows:
SerialPort.Output(chr(128) & "Z" & chr(13))
SerialPort.Output(chr(129) & "ECHO" & chr(13))
SerialPort.Output(chr(130) & "ECHO" & chr(13))
SerialPort.Output(chr(131) & "ECHO" & chr(13))
SerialPort.Output(chr(132) & "ECHO" & chr(13))
I've translated into .NET with:
SerialPort.Write((char)128 + "Z" + (char)13);
SerialPort.Write((char)129 + "ECHO" + (char)13);
SerialPort.Write((char)130 + "ECHO" + (char)13);
SerialPort.Write((char)131 + "ECHO" + (char)13);
SerialPort.Write((char)132 + "ECHO" + (char)13);
But it does not work.
Now I can not try but I wonder if it can work to rewrite my code like this:
SerialPort.Write("Z" + (char)13);
SerialPort.Write("1ECHO" + (char)13);
SerialPort.Write("2ECHO" + (char)13);
SerialPort.Write("3ECHO" + (char)13);
SerialPort.Write("4ECHO" + (char)13);
If it will work, why does it work? And if it does not work, how do I correctly translate my colleague's code?