Serial Communication in Arev32 (OpenInsight 32-bit Specific)
At 30 MAY 2009 09:48:40AM Michael Matthews wrote:
Does anyone know of a good substitute for the V123 and V124 functions for Arev32/OI?
At 30 MAY 2009 10:51PM Eric wrote:
What device are you connecting to/with?
Most comms nowadays is TCP/IP based. There is some basic OI functionality around a number of popular protocols (HTTP/FTP/etc), or you can "roll your own" functionality by writing OI code to address Windows DLLs from Basic+.
As it is difficult to write server-based code (ie. the end that waits for a connection) some functionality (eg. multi-apartment threading models) may not be immediately possible from within OI itself without considerable work.
Another consideration is that some PC hardfware is overclocked, which sometimes mitigates against reliable serial connections to some devices. I'm thinking of the many NC Punch machines, dongles and timeclocks I've connected to over the years. All were flakey in fast hardware situations. Sometimes we had to reduce the PC's chip speed from the BIOS to get the comms to work reliably from AREV.
Recall that while AREV had an assembly language interface, and V123 was written in assembler, and used a DOS device driver in some instances, the way to do serial comms changes in the 32-bit world, and you will need to use 32-bit DLLs or to achieve the
same result. In some cases these are available from third party vendors who bundle the functionality.
eg.
http://www.marshallsoft.com/wsc4c.htm
http://www.componentsource.com/features/serial-communication/dll/index.html
http://www.moskalyuk.com/blog/net-rs232-serial-port-communication-with-rs232dll
Note - I haven't used any of the above products with OI. They may require some effort to prototype reliably.
See also:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms810467.aspx
Welcome to the can of worms!