Owner's manual

- Start and End Strings -
STRINGS are the names of the list of commands which you
can tell the Smart Brick Brain send at the start or end of any show.
They are used primarily to talk to LaserDisk (or DVD) players, al-
though they can be used with any type of show to send and re-
ceive characters through the serial port, turn on the tape deck
control outputs, or cause the Smart Brick Brain to wait until it gets a
switch closure on one of it’s inputs before continuing. They can
also be used to send commands through the serial port to any
other piece of show equipment that needs a serial input, or even
just to print on a monitoring screen that a show has started or
ended.
On the Show and String Setup menu, there are nine strings
shown, each of which can hold up to twelve characters. If longer
strings are needed, you just omit the special character which tells
the Smart Brick Brain that it has found the end of a string, and it
will continue sending the next string, and the next, and the next,
until it finds an ‘end-o-string’ special character or the last charac-
ter of string 9. This is the only way to send the last two strings, as
they can not be accessed directly as the first seven strings can.
Characters are entered into the strings as HEXadecimal ASCII
characters. As an example of the using ASCII:
To send a letter “a“, you enter the HEXadecimal value of
61.
If bit seven of any ASCII character is set to =1, then instead of
sending the character out the serial port, the Smart Brick Brain will
wait until it receives this character through the serial port. As an
example of using ASCII to receive a character:
To wait until the Smart Brick Brain receives a letter “a“, you
enter a value of E1.
The Smart Brick Brain has a limited supply of patience when
waiting for a character to be returned from the serial port. If it
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