[GreenKeys] Volpe board figs/letters function?

[eric]

On 2019-10-11 10:41, E. wrote:
> I haven’t been able to look at that link yet - will this weekend… so
> if there is an answer in those, please ignore ;o … but is there a
> trigger for figures and letters as well :) ?
> 

The principle of operation is that the board knows which ASCII 
characters will need LTRS or FIGS when translated into ITA/Baudot. So if 
you've been typing letters and then type a number, it knows it will
have to send a FIGS to switch cases. It knows this for special 
characters, too, so in the case of BELL,
if you're typing letters and then send a ^G, which is the ascii 
equivalent of BELL, it will know
it needs to send LTRS first. And it keeps track of shift, so that if you 
continue typing numbers for instance, it won't send FIGS again, since it 
knows it's already in FIGS.

Ideally you should rarely if ever need to explicitly tell it to send 
LTRS or FIGS because it goes to quite some effort to sync its LTRS/FIGS 
state with that of the teletype. But it can happen that you need to, for 
instance if they get out of sync due to an error, or you just want to 
mess around. That's why there are the "special" characters which 
explicitly change shift. (I forget which ascii characters Jordan set 
them to, this is a relatively recent addition to the firmware).

Note that even if you do explicitly force it to transmit FIGS, if you 
then type an ASCII letter, the board will say to itself "Huh, i'm in 
FIGS but i need to send a letter, so I'll send LTRS to shift cases 
first" and undo it.

Also - if you want explicit control of what gets transmitted, instead of 
just letting the board auto-translate, you can put it in "notranslate" 
mode and send ITA/Baudot characters directly with absolutely no 
interference from the firmware.

eric

> 
>> On Oct 10, 2019, at 3:28 pm, Jordan Spencer Cunningham 
>> <js at teletype.net> wrote:
>> 
>> Sorry I haven't responded to your private message. I've not had much 
>> time to do so. It is not for a lack of desire-- just a lack of time 
>> and sanity. I'll do a quick response via mobile here while I have the 
>> chance.
>> 
>> The easiest way to ring a bell from the computer is to send the BEL 
>> character (or ALERT-- same thing, different nomenclature). Modern 
>> charsets still make use of this, so the computer "knows" what it is. 
>> Many systems will still pllay an alert sound or flash the window or 
>> something. The Volpe board will accordingly go into FIGS and issue the 
>> bell encoding on the loop, too.
>> 
>> You have to send the character using a hex byte, however. There are a 
>> few ways to do this. If using something that understands these bytes 
>> such as printf, you can issue the raw byte. That hex byte is "0x07". 
>> You can also use an escape sequence on most *nixes, which is "\a". I 
>> believe ^G (that is-- Ctl+G) will also have the same effect. Should 
>> work in Windows as well, though I have not played with it in Windows 
>> much.
>> 
>> I will outline this in the docs I've been slowly building up at 
>> teletype.net as it's a great question, but this wikipedia article also 
>> gets the gist I think:
>> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_character
>> 
>> Sorry again for not responding. It's not you-- it's me. ;)
>> 
>> -
>> Jordan Spencer Cunningham
>> teletype.net
>> 
>> 
>> On Thu, Oct 10, 2019, at 2:12 PM, E. wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hey all,
>>> 
>>> On the v2 version of the Volpe board, how does one get to both 
>>> figures and letters using a computer keyboard through the board ;o 
>>> (for example, ringing the bell when in letters - the only way I can 
>>> get it to do it right now is by having the 19 in figures by punching 
>>> figures in first on the Teletype keyboard, then ringing the bell on 
>>> the computer keyboard)???  I know that Jordan Spencer Cunningham has 
>>> some custom firmware on his boards that might do this, but am not 
>>> sure ;o … trying to figure it out ;p .
>>> 
>>> Thank much in advance ^^ !!!
>> 
> 
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