Help understanding GameDash Data

I'd really appreciate if someone could help me understand the format that GameDash sends numbers to a serial port device.

In GameEngine when you setup an interface you can specify the Bit Range for the output. Am I understanding correctly that this allows you to take the full Axis range and map it down into a particular data size? For example, if the range for <Axis1> is -32767 to 32767 setting the Bit Range to 8-bit would map these values to +/- 127 or 0 to 256?

This feature seems to be missing from GameDash and the Ard device I'm controlling uses a 4-byte command packet in the following format:

[StartByte] [CommandByte] [Param1] [Param2]

For example, to control the speed of the two attached motors I would send:

[StartByte] ['S'] [128] [255]

Where 'S' means to "set the speed", 128 is left motor at 50% and 255 is right motor at 100%.

As you can see, I need to be able to send axis values as a single byte. I have been able to do this successfully in GameEngine but I have not been able to do it successfully from GameDash. I have figured out how to convert the dash value (meters per second) to a range of 0 - 255, but when the game runs the hardware doesn't respond in the way it does in GameEngine. I'm guessing because GameDash is sending the <Dash> values as Integers instead of Bytes.

I could troubleshoot this using a Serial Port Monitor tool, but the cheapest 64-bit serial port monitoring tool I can find is $60 and I hate to buy it just for a single use.

Any pointers on how to map GameDash values into single bytes?

Thanks!

@yobuddy , @value1 , @RufusDufus , @prilad ?

Well, I answered my own question. The trick to get a single byte (or bytes) is to use TOCHR. For my example above, here's what I did:

PERCENT 0 30
SCALE 0 255
ROUND 0
TOCHR


PERCENT 0 30 means any speed over 30 m/s will be considered 100% speed.
SCALE 0 255 means to convert that percentage into a number between 0 and 255.
ROUND 0 to get rid of trailing decimal places
TOCHR to convert the value to an array of characters (bytes). Since the value can fit within a single byte, only a single byte is produced.

Now I just wish I could figure out a way to use PERCENT 2 30. I don't want to cut down on the fans top speed but I don't want it to start spinning until at least 2 m/s. If I use PERCENT 2 30 and the value is less than 2 it actually produces negative numbers! Those can't be converted to chars.

@yobuddy any chance you could add a CLAMP method to Game Dash? When we're converting to chars (bytes) we can't use negative numbers, but I think this would be helpful in other scenarios too.

For now until I've modified the PERCENT method in my GameDash.exe to not allow numbers to go negative.


WAS:

if (Conversions.ToDouble(str2) > 100.0)
{
str2 = "100";
}
else if (Conversions.ToDouble(str2) < -100.0)
{
str2 = "-100";
}


(TEMPORARILY) CHANGED TO:

if (Conversions.ToDouble(str2) > 100.0)
{
str2 = "100";
}
else if (Conversions.ToDouble(str2) < 0.0)
{
str2 = "0";
}


I'd love to help with bug fixes or feature requests if you're interested in having a contributor.

Thanks!