Hello!

I'm looking for a little advice on a project of mine where I try to control a video with an exercise bike.

The exercise bike (Kettler Ergometer X3) has a serial RS232 interface and it comes with a software (Tour Concept 1.0) that can receive all kind of information like the pulse, distance, rpm, speed and so on. The driven distance is what I would like to get access to in processing.

I used a serial port monitor to see what information is exchanged between the computer and the bike when the software is running.
This is what I found:

Request: 13.03.2008 12:55:46.37464 (+0.6563 seconds)

50 57 20 32 35 0D 0A                              
--
PW 25..        


Answer: 13.03.2008 12:55:46.43664 (+0.0625 seconds)

30 30 30 09 30 30 30 09 30 30 30 09 30 30 34 09
30 32 35 09 30 30 30 37 09 30 31 3A 31 30 09 30  
30 30 0D 0A                                      
--
000.000.000.004.
025.0007.01:10.0
00..            


You can see that with the request PW 25.. the bike will answer with 000.000.000.004.025.0007.01:10.000..
In this sting I can find all data necessary for me. If I can get it into processing my problem would be salved.

I assume I can use the serial library with some kind of myPort.write(PW 25..);
But as the communication goes on in HEX I'm not sure how to do this.

Anyone out there that has done something like this before or can give me some advice?


cheers    andy

In the meantime, I’ve got a workable solution:
As I mentioned, the request I have to send is:

50 57 20 32 35 0D 0A   -->   PW 25 ..

I now found out that the 4 chars at the end of the the ASCI-Code (0D 0A) are in fact a line-break.
My serial monitor couldn’t identify that and printed two points instead.

And this is how it worked out in processing:

myPort.write("PW 25"); // send request of data
myPort.write("\n"); // send line-break

The answer I get is a nice string where I can pick up the informations I need.

Thanks for your attention!

Cheers

Andy