Week 8 Progress:

   Will continue to test the communications through the serial port.  Also I will try to make our palm application nicer and add some more feature.  We are planning to work a lot more on the hardware also.

    I tested the serial communication and found some bugs.  First, my test cases all failed because somehow my comparisons are incorrect.  I tried a lot of ways to do my if statements (event pointers) but it wouldn't work.  Its hard to debug in codewarrior because it would not break at my breakpoints when using the debugger.  I also tried to point popup triggers and lists on my triggering condition but read through the tutorial and found that it was too time consuming to do 8 of them.  Also, we don't need it because I think we will only have time (hopefully) to trigger for high, low, and don't care. 

    Instead, I redid my main menu and used checkboxes.  This is easier to test and more user friendly because the user does not have to use graffiti to type.  I also redid my test cases to use these two checkboxes (for each channel) and sent strings based on these flags.

    Another bug that I found that was really tricky was because we send 0000 in binary for don't care.  Since we send the signals for two channels at a time, this is give 0x00.  It is a problem because this is hex for a null character.  When we use strlen() function, it will stop at this null and ignore the rest.  Therefore, my whole string will not be sent.  We decided to use 1111 in binary to send don't care. 

    I will point my new form and the code soon.  At this point, the sending part of the communication is almost complete.  I've tested receiving and it is successful, I just need to parse the protocol and display it in appropriate fields on the form.