Blink Service Port Debugging Prints "Garbage"

jrcwest · September 17, 2019, 12:48pm

Hello All,

I’ve been having a bit of trouble with a game I’ve been trying to develop, so I figured I’d give debugging through the service port a try. I’ve followed the instructions featured in the quickstart guide, making sure I included "#include "Serial.h" at the top of my sketch, and created an instance of service port serial using ServicePortSerial sp;. I call my debug messages in the code like this:

sp.println("GameState 0");

However, when I go to read the output through the Arduino IDE, this is what I see:

Does anyone have an idea of what I might be doing wrong here? I made sure the baud rate is set properly. I thought maybe the cable I was using may have been too long but that doesn’t seem to matter.

Thanks for your help!

bigjosh · September 18, 2019, 5:36am

Try 1000000 baud and see if that works. I think it was increased a few versions ago.

bigjosh · September 18, 2019, 6:26am

Yep, looks like should be 1M baud…

github.com

bigjosh/Move38-Arduino-Platform/blob/dev/Service Port.MD#use


> *"The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements."*
 
-Brian Kernighan, "Unix for Beginners" (1979)


#### Service Port

Each Blink tile has a service port to make developing and debugging easier. For example:

* See print statements
* Accept type in values and commands 
* Output precise timing signals to an oscilloscope
 

### Seeing output

When writing normal game code, you can use the the service port as a serial connection to the host computer.

#### Connection

This file has been truncated. show original

jrcwest · September 18, 2019, 1:25pm

Yep that fixed it. @jbobrow could that possibly be updated in the documentation?

Thanks for the help!

jbobrow · September 18, 2019, 1:40pm

Yup! I’ll do that today

jbobrow · September 18, 2019, 4:58pm

Updated in the docs https://github.com/Move38/Blinks-SDK-Docs-EN/blob/master/docs/quickstart.md#using-the-blinks-service-port-to-talk-to-or-listen-to-your-blink

Also, I should note, we could use a little help cleaning up our docs. We’ve built a lot since the docs began and so I put them up on GitHub to be contributed to by anyone that is excited to help. The docs are running live from here on GitHub. The first version of the docs has [EN] for english so that it can be forked and provide translations. I figure a good clean up and pass of the docs in English makes sense first, but then having some translations would be very exciting.

jrcwest · September 18, 2019, 5:17pm

I’ll keep that in mind! I’d be glad to help out with anything that needs updating or clarification.