Get Data from serial port

[pima]

hello!

we are currently developing an application for managing warehouse in- and outbound.

to do this we have to use barcode-scanners of course. in the past we have used usb-scanners which simply emulate a keyboard. but now we have to use a new scanner which is connected to the host pc via bluetooth and bluetooth serial port.

i know that there are many 3rd party apps which will run in background and take the data from com port and paste the scanned data via screen-buffer to the currently focused application. but they dont support response back to the scanner.

but we want do sent ACK or NAK return to the scanner to indicate the result of dataprocessing.


so can anybody help me, getting this to work?

My Progress-App should open the COM-Port, listening for incoming data, do some processing and then send ACK or NAK return to the scanner so that the user gets response from the scanner.


thank you!

Marcus

 

[lloydt]

In a past life, I was able to use mscomm32.ocx which is a Microsoft ocx in system32. I don't know if it's related to vb6 controls or not. The only issue we ran into was being able to determine the end of the communication, basically implemented a pause for 1 second and assumed (hoped) it would have completed by that point in time. That may or may not be a problem for your case, we were getting data over a network which had larger "packets" of data which is a little different than what you are doing. I don't recall if we were able or needed to talk back to the device, but I'm assuming this control will handle that aspect.

Regards
LT

 

[plus_marca]

Hi, pima.

Take a look at this code.

http://www.progresstalk.com/showthread.php?t=279&highlight=OpenCommunications

 

[pima]

Hi!

The code from Chris looks interessting, can somebody provide me an example how to use it in my case?

thanks!

marcus