hope someone in this forum can help

[sdh]

hope someone in this forum can help.

I am starting to write an application that will talk to sartorius weighing balances through comm 1. This is extremely new to me I realise I will need to use mscomm control and am starting to read up about it. Can anyone offer some support in the way of reccommendations, starting code, books to look at web pages etc. Any help would be much appreciated

thanx

sdh
:

 

[JerryDennison]

What do you want to bring the data into? If it's strictly for your benefit and you're not trying to develop some type of commercial applications you can use a software wedge. There are several available and they are very innexpensive. Bascially they intercept anything coming in the comm port and route it to whatever document or application is active at the time, pasting it into wherever the cursor happens to be. Some of them have more control than that but they are very easy to use.

If you must create the interface yourself you'll find Hyperterminal very helpful in determining the format of the datastream.

What application are you needing this for?

 

[sdh]

I would like to write something for my friends benefit only not commercial which takes the data coming in from a balance and places it into excel either as an vb standalone application or a addin.

:

 

[JerryDennison]

The reason I asked is because I'm collecting data everyday from various measurement instruments(including weigh scales). Typically, this data is used in quality control or SPC(Statistical Process Control) types of applications. There are some excellent programs available that have gage interfaces. One that I use is InfinityQS from Lyle-Kearsley Systems. This is not an endorsement for any particular SPC package. I just wonder why re-invent the wheel? Most of these packages now support ODBC and other database formats directly (including Excel). Just a thought.

 

[sixtoedsloth]

hi.

usually, the sequence is as follows
the scale will be in one of two modes
RSO or CSO these being requested or continuous
serial output.

if you need a "legal weight" use RSO
then send a character to the scale
and start listening to the port.
a string will be returned. it will have
a start and end char and in between will be
the weight, tare, resolution(00.000 etc)

cso just keeps sending the string.

hope that helps.

Russ

 

[Jimdeb03]

I have a similar issue with networking scales through a serial port, but my issue involves networking these scales to a database using TCP/IP. Maybe we can help each other out.
My current setup uses a Lantronix UDS-100 device server which converts the serial connection from the Weigh-tronix scale to TCP/IP. When a request is made from the scale, it is sent via TCP/IP to SQL Server which in turn processes the request and sends the result back to the same scale.
That's the theory and have been suggested to use a TCP Wedge software package on the server to communicate with the scales. More info on the software is at

http://www.taltech.com/TALtech_web/products/tcpwedge.html

However, I'm researching if IIS would suffice for the functionality the Wedge software provides and am looking for any feedback on pursuing this. The issue with the Wedge software in question is that is delivers the data stream as DDE or keystrokes, which would need another application to inteface with SQL.
Any ideas?
thanks,
Jim