Open Source Software in Ontario Secondary Schools | |
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1. Introduction 1.1 HistorySkip this if you don't like fairy tales. Once upon a time, in a cold country way up north the board of education decided to buy a load of fancy equipment for highschool students to use in their labs. They look like this pasco.jpg and are good for measuring temperature, speed, pH, etc. Models SW500i. From now on I will call them lbbs (little black boxes). Soon enough teachers knew they would never use those things. I'll tell you why: the lbbs were capable of doing amazing things and the software was appropriately complex. What PASCO Scientific didn't think of was that people in a high school (students and teachers alike) had no time or desire to do rocket science. PASCO wouldn't even consider rewriting their software, instead they suggested buying the newer, even fancier boxes. The techers didn't think that was funny. The entire project proved to be a failure. So one day some teacher (John Selmys) asked some student (me) whether he wants to write a linux library in C for enabling communication with an lbb. Later on applications would be written to use that library. The student said ok and started the work. In the meantime PASCO Scientific kindly gave us a copy of basic documentation for that model of lbb. Vary basic, but enough to write the access library. Of did I forget to mention John and me are both big linux fans? Naturally all the work would be done in and for linux. Cross-platform compatibility came to mind a few times but I decided against it. Microsoft devtools refuse to compile any of my C/C++ assignments and I don't really care to find out why.
1.2 Intended AudienceThis document was written for people interested in creating applications for the SW500i using the sw500-l1 library. It has walkthrough of lbb's operation from power up to something usefull, a reference section describing the usage of all functions and explanations for whatever i can explain. At the time of writing most capabilities of the lbb have been accounted for in the library. The two or three left out are used for data logging away from the lab (the lbb is portable). I don't work for PASCO. I am not a programing/EE guru. Many things I don't understand. However, this documents is the best you'll get to guide you with the lbb.
1.3 Contact InformationIf you have suggestions for improving this document or find mistakes, please let me know. My current email address is andrew-smith at mail ru.
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