VB and serial port

king_of_inismac

Hi,
I need to learn how to control a piece of hardware using the serial interface. The hardware in question has a serial interface, and has its own protocol for interfacing with the PC. E.G I must output 01hex in order to set the device into read mode, etc.
Does anyone know of any good tutorials or books which deal with the topic??
thanks

Hobbes

I did this years ago and found that VB (Well I think it was VB Professional 3? Been so long) they had basically screwed up the Comm widget and it was by no means realible.

I just ended up doing the stuff in DOS, which was a lot easier.

Before you start communicating with the machine you need to find out a couple of things on how the device communicates (eg. XON/OFF/DSR/Speed/Parity) and some devices use cross over cables and others use straight through.

For starters try messing around with a Telnet connected to COM1: (whatever) and see if you can get feedback sending the information in that way.

Looking around for anything that may help.

http://www.taltech.com/TALtech_web/resources/intro-sc.html#232c

http://www.pcplus.co.uk/media/pcplus/pdf/191/191.programmers%20world.vb.pdf

str8_away

Hi there

If you are using VB6 you could simply use comm control.
MSCOMM32.cox

I have used it to create a program to talk to my PDA and modem and it works fine.

just do a search on "VB COMM" you will get lots of info.