First, thanks for the cool scripts - here's some notes I learned in getting them working with Windows 7:
1. Google 'ActiveState Perl', find it, and install it. I used "C:\Perl" as the location on my machine.
2. The actual Perl.exe is in the "c:\perl\bin" subdirectory. If you want to run perl from anywhere, you have to add this to the 'environment variable'.
3. Modify the environment variable by clicking on the round windows globe at the bottom left hand corner of the screen. "Right-click" on "Computer" and select "Properties" in that menu. Find 'Advanced Settings' on the window that opens. That gives yet another window. Click on the 'Advanced' tab. At the bottom of this screen (still with me?) there's a button that says 'Environment Variables'. Click it and another window opens. In the bottom window, scroll down to 'Path' - click once to highlight it and click on 'Edit'. Now, at the end of the string, add a semicolon, then "c:\perl\bin". Click 'Okay' to save your work.
4. Click the windows globe thing and type 'cmd' in the search window. Mine comes up in the 'c:\windows\system32' directory. I always move to another directory, so run 'cd c:\perl', for instance.
5. You will occasionally run into permissions issues with Windows 7. Sometimes, the fix for this is to 'Right-Click' on the 'cmd' icon and select 'Run as administrator'. You can google this first and read about the benefits and possible problems with doing this.
6. The BusPirate perl scripts need Win32::SerialPort to work. I couldn't find a pre-compiled module with ppm for this. Google 'Win32::SerialPort' and 'CPAN' and download it as an archive. Extract it to 'c:\perl\lib'. It will make a directory 'Win32-SerialPort' there.
7. If, like me, you don't have a compiler and make program installed, google 'MinGW' and find its' home. There's an install program. Mine ended up in 'c:\MinGW'. I put 'c:\mingw' and 'c:\mingw\bin' in my environment variable.
8. Google 'dmake' and find its' home. I downloaded the archive and extracted it to 'c:\dmake'. You can add this to the environment variable, or copy the executable and 'startup' subdirectory to some directory already in your path. I copied to 'c:\perl\bin'.
9. Cd to some harmless directory, say 'c:\perl', and run 'mingw' from the command line to see that it works. Also try 'dmake'. They won't do anything, but should show that your system knows where they are...
10. Now, cd to 'c:\perl\lib\win32-serialport' . You should be able to run 'perl makefile.pl' from there. I then ran 'dmake' from there and it appeared to install the Win32::SerialPort module. After that, I was able to run the example perl scripts here, though I had to change them from 'COM2' to 'COM4'.
