Using the Tools

From the Command-Line:

You can call the BASIC Stamp Tools For Linux commands directly from a shell terminal. It's easy to use these commands within a 'Makefile', too! (See below.)

1. Create your PBASIC™ code using your favorite text editor (Emacs, vi, Nano, Joe, Kate, Gnotepad, etc.)

2. Tokenize the code using bstamp_tokenize:

   bstamp_tokenize PROGRAM.bs2 PROGRAM.tok

3. Send the tokenized program to the BASIC Stamp®, using bstamp_run:

   bstamp_run PROGRAM.tok

   If your program writes any output to the serial port (e.g., using PBASIC™ "DEBUG" commands), bstamp_run will display them.

Using Pipes on the Command-Line:

As of the version released in May, 2004, the BASIC Stamp Tools For Linux can be chained together using POSIX 'pipes' (the "|" character in your shell).

If you send a file to the 'standard input' (stdin) of bstamp_tokenize, and the tokenized version will be sent to its 'standard output' (stdout).

You can then pipe the tokenized version of your program to bstamp_run's 'standard input', and it will be uploaded to the BASIC Stamp® device and ran!

cat PROGRAM.bs2 | bstamp_tokenize | bstamp_run

The advantage is that there's only one line of commands you need to issue, and there's no intermediate ("PROGRAM.tok") file created.

(Thanks to Francis Esmonde-White for adding this feature.)

Using a Makefile

Using the tools with 'make' is quite easy. Here's a simple example 'Makefile':

# My makefile all:  program.tok clean:      -rm program.tok program.tok:  program.bs2      bstamp_tokenize program.bs2 program.tok

If you edit the source file, program.bs2, you need only run the command "make" and it will automatically re-tokenize it (updating program.tok).

You can even add a "run" target, which will re-tokenize and send and run the program on the BASIC Stamp!

... run: program.tok      bstamp_run program.tok ...

Run the command "make run" and off it goes!

From within KDevelop:

KDevelop is a popular graphical tool for writing software ¹ that's part of the K Desktop Environment (KDE) for Linux and Unix.

Instructions coming soon. (If you can help explain this, please e-mail Bill Kendrick.)

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Also known as an Integrated Development Environment, or IDE.

PBASIC is a trademark and BASIC Stamp is a registered trademark of Parallax, Inc.
Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds.