Here at ULPGC I'm following a Robotics course. In the practical part of the exam we have to write some applications to operating some didactics robots we have (Rhino XR-4 and SCARA Robots).

Each robot is connected to a Controller (Rhino Mark-4) which can be connected to a PC to send commands to the Controller in order to let the robots do things.

The PC to Controller connection is a serial RS-232 connection.

Recently I had to play with serial RS232 connections in order to control a robot we have here in the Robotics course at the ULPGC.

We have some pretty old (1989!!!) applications to control and configure the robots which used to run under DOS. I tried to run them under dosemu: unfortunately it didn't work. Maybe because the code the applications use is not really good (direct access to the hardware, incorrect driver usage etc..).