Brad,
The RB part is very easy to implement, check out the language reference,
it's got all you need to know.
The hard part is to find out what 'language' to use when talking to your
watch if you don't have any documentation. The best thing to do is to
'sniff' your serial communication. There are several ways to achieve this:
There is a tool called 'Serialtest Spy' from Frontline, which allows you to
sniff your local serial port (PC only):
http://www.fte.com/spy01.asp
I believe they have demo downloads. Install and run the tool, then run your
DOS program. With the tool you can find out what bit format and baudrate the
port is running at, and it records the data going back and forth. This
should enable you to figure out what commands are being sent to the watch,
and what format the data is in that the watch sends back.
If can't use this tool for any reason, you can add 2 more serial ports to
your computer (there are inexpensive USB to Serial port interfaces). Then
you can program your own sniffer in RB. This is real easy and is a nice
hobby project to familiarize yourself with RB's Serial control. All you need
is a program that sends the data received on one port to the other and vice
versa, and logs the data to an Editfield or a file. You should be able to
write something up in less than an hour or so. The easiest would be to
implement the whole thing in an event driven way, i.e. in the
'DataAvailable' event of one port, read the data with ReadAll and write it
to the other port (and also send it to an EditField or file). Do this for
both ports.
To sniff the data, plug in your watch into port 3, and connect port 1 to
port 2 via a nullmodem cable. Make sure your DOS program uses port 1, and
make sure your sniffer program exchanges data between port 2 and 3, and that
they are set to the same baudrate and byte format (no of bits, parity, etc)
as the DOS program. This works great for debugging purposes too.
Good luck.
Roger
----- Original Message -----
From: "Herder, Bradford J" <bradford dot j dot herder at lmco dot com>
To: "Getting Started" <gettingstarted at lists dot realsoftware dot com>
Sent: Thursday, March 31, 2005 1:47 PM
Subject: Old Fashioned Serial Port Communications
Hi,
Can RB talk to a PC's Old Fashioned Serial Port?
Does anyone have any examples along those lines?
I have this stopwatch that can interface with PC's serial port but it
uses a DOS program to receive info into a flat file. I'd love to
convert this to work via a RB windows app, maybe launch Excel.
Of course, I have no documentation on how to talk to this watch...
This is the watch:
http://www.toptime.com/499/499.html
If there's some way to tell the watch - send me some data,
I got it, send me some more, I could look at what I got and
figure out what it's sending.
Probably a pipe dream, but have to ask.
Thanks,
Brad
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