[dba-Tech] OT: Is anyone into controllers?

On 27 Sep 2006 at 10:30, Lembit Soobik wrote:

> oh, thats great. Thanks a lot.
> now I only need to find out how to talk to the serial,
> but I think there must be some dll or such around somewhere.

In Access, or VB the simplest way is to use the MSComm control.

Personally, I use PowerBasic (http://www.powerbasic.com) for this sort of 
thing. Here's a bit of sample code to show how complicated it is to write 
something to a serial port <g>:

    LOCAL strPort AS STRING
    LOCAL strData AS STRING
    LOCAL lngFilenum as LONG

    strPort = "COM1"   'comm port to write to
    strData =  "ATZ" & CHR$(13,10)  'data to write to port

    lngFileNum = FREEFILE 'get next free handle

    COMM OPEN portstr AS lngFilenum
    COMM SET lngFilenum, BAUD = 9600   ' 9600 baud
    COMM SET lngFilenum, BYTE = 8      ' 8 bits
    COMM SET lngFilenum, PARITY = %FALSE  ' No parity
    COMM SET lngFilenum, STOP = 0 ' 1 stop bit
    COMM SET lngFilenum, TXBUFFER = 2048 ' transmit buffer
    COMM SET lngFilenum, RXBUFFER = 4096 ' receive buffer
    COMM SEND lngFilenum, strData
    COMM CLOSE lngFilenum

One of the sample apps that come with PB contains all the code you need to 
read and write to a comm port.


-- 
Stuart