Using the CUI32 StickOS command line in Linux
Even though I really don’t play with my hardware toys much anymore, I keep an eye on the hardware hacker blogs. So when I heard rumors of the CUI32, I admit that I was salivating a little. I told myself it might be a good platform to teach a summer workshop to some high school students. This is like a star-wars fan telling you the $45 Bobba Fett miniature he just bought is “for his kids”.
But the is pretty hot. Designed for USB. Built in BASIC. Plus there seems to be a built-in bootloader so you don’t need an external programmer.
There is not a ton of documentation for this device. In particular, I had a heck of a time figuring out how to get Linux to communicate with its serial BASIC tty interface. By doing a “ls /dev/tty*” I could see there was a serial device called “/dev/ttyUSB0”. But how to talk to it. I tried minicom but it kept giving me errors. I was wondering if there was some mysterious undocumented setting about party, flow control, or some other madness that I never really understood.
Then I tried putty.
putty -serial /dev/ttyUSB0
Worked like a charm.