[misterhouse-users] Need quick help - Basic Stamp Question

[Brian G. <ata...@gm...>]

I hope someone here can help me.  I'm trying to connect a Basic Stamp
1 to MisterHouse, and I need to get it working in time for Halloween,
if possible.  I built a box to control some strobe lights, and send
commands over serial back to a computer to play thunder sounds last
year for my haunted cemetery.  I used a program called PCRemote to
activate the sounds.  This year, I'd like to interface it with some
X10 modules through MisterHouse.  So far, MH hasn't seen it though.

My existing program on my Basic Stamp sends a single letter over the
serial port.  The letter A, B, C, or D.  Each tells the program to
play the related sound file.  I setup MH with a simple program to
speak "It Works" whenever it receives one of those letters over
serial.  I added this to my privite.ini file:

serial1_port: com1
serial1_baudrate: 2400
serial1_handshake: none
serial1_datatype: raw

Then I wrote a simple program I called halloween.pl.  It looks
something like this:

$testA = new Serial_Item('A', 'thunderA', 'serial1');
if (state_now $testA){
    speak "It Works A";
}

I repeated that for B, C, and D.  MisterHouse acts like it isn't
getting any commands from the Basic Stamp.  This is not a Basic Stamp
2, so there is no dedicated serial port.  I'm just using a single IO
pin.  Also, my existing hardware does not have the loop back
connection to disable hardware handshaking.  It worked fine with
PCRemote, but maybe MH needs that connected?

Thanks for any help!

Brian G.