Hi Thankyou for these replies. I have recently heard that Visual Basic is the easiest way to do this.

I wondered if readers have opinions on Visual Basic.-Also I hope that it'll be OK with Windows Vista Home Premium. Basically, I have PIC systems where i need them to be easily reconfigurable.that is, when required, i need to serially send bytes from the PC to the PIC to give a different performance option, say..i want to program the PC to present a dialog box, with say three or so PWM (say) byte options.then, clicking on one of these will serially send the byte from PC to PIC. I could do this all with a hardware 'switch-box' but it's not so user-friendly as a nice PC interface with easy to understand dialog box's.

The incoming and outgoing arrays hold 16 bytes each; the serial protocol only supports byte-sized values. Word- and long-sized data must. PC Communication. PC programmers have many choices for PC development software including C/C++/C#. Delphi, Real BASIC and Visual BASIC to name a few.

I had a look at that Profilab 4 web page and could not assess whether it was really relevant. I hear that Matlab is expensive. I used it at College for math stuff but was not aware that it could do serial comms too -thankyou for this information.

Well all these things are possible in Profilab,accessing the serial port in VB is also not that difficult however with the changes made to VB to be a.NET framwork partner these things are not so easy as it were in say VB.6.Matlab is very expensive and so is LABVIEW which is a software specially designed for measurement and control and accessing instruments. Just came to my mind that Real Basic is also a possible option to you there a number of people on this forum using Real Basic as I recall previous post on this topic however you still need to learn the language to use it with PRofilab it is as drawing a schematic and the application code is generated by the compiler in compile time. But must also say that it is generating a little bit more code than what I professional programmer would generate in VB or C# but as I understand what you would like to do this overhead will not effect you in any way and you really will need a large application before this will cause you any problems.The benifit is that you need not to learn a language to use it. Hi, Dear Friend I can help you to make this interface and I can supply you an example with the source code in VB6, to help you to interface you pic with a pc. But, I want to ask about some thing, what is your communication protocol? First you must impelement your communication protocol and then the interfacing will be easy.

So, first go and build the communication protocol or use any standard one (ex. Modbus) and then program your firmware to handle this protocol and also the vb program on your pc. Hey Winterburn, you are an EE Student, right?

Most universities have a thing called an 'academic alliance', which allows students to get many different types of applications appropriate to their field of study for free. See if you school has an academic alliance. There is also software available from Microsoft called 'Visual Studio 2008 Express Editions', but I am not exactly sure what they are capable of. Go to and look around.

At the bottom of the page they have 'Visual C# 2008 Express' this would probably be exactly what you want. They also have a link to learn how to use this software. Let me know if I can help you anymore.

I have a heavy duty 400lb capacity scale from Pelouze: It has a 9 pin Serial RS232 port on the side. I was looking to connect it to a G4 for the purpose of importing the displayed weight into a software package. Preliminary research indicates I will need two things: 1. A Serial (male) to USB (male) adapter cable with a driver that will correctly communicate with the scale. Software to graphically display the output of the driver.

The manufacturer does give some basic information on the serial connection: Serial Cable Pinout: Pin 3 = DATA Pin 5 = COMMON Communications Protocol: Speed = 2400 Bps Word Length = 8 bits Parity = none Stop bits = 1 Posted on Mar 23, 2011 8:01 PM. I am nor sure you can just adapt USB to serial. But I do think there are USB-to-Serial adapter boxes (with a driver) that you can buy.

Blackberry Storm 9530 Device Software Download. Keyspan seems to make one or two, and they have been working in the Mac marketplaces, so would likely have a driver that would work. A few others pop up in a simple search as well. Once you get adapted to any kind of DB-9 or DB-25 serial port, you can get two connectors at Radio Shack and wire a custom stunt box to re-wire any way you please.

Business Proposal For Cctv Installation Checklist. The Mac Mini DIN-8 connectors are very hard to find, unless you cut up a Mac serial device cable. If you do that, you may encounter silver-satin conductors, which are very hard to work with.

Each conductor has a polyester core with extremely fine wire would around that core. It does not solder well at all. Really flexible, but very hard to repair.

Mar 24, 2011 5:32 PM. Update: Was hoping t use the Keyspan cable as I’ve seen it mentioned in several other boards for a number of years, but the POSIX API mentioned in their brochure for this product is no longer supported per the following statement form the company: [quote]Unfortunately, this type of support is no longer offered, following the purchase of Keyspan by Tripp Lite a few years ago. It appears our marketing department failed to update the manual, deleting the Developer[quote] So I opted for a TRENDnet product off Amazon for $12.00 that has high ratings. It uses one of the “chips” (PL-2303) you are suppose to use for this and it has Mac drivers.

I believe it also has a little app used to set-up the initial connection or maybe I could use one of those BDAqua mentioned since I retain Classic for use with some old peripherals. The article below contains more information on this chip, although not this specific product: Looks like the next step would be to try to whip up a application in a old copy of Realbasic using the serial class to talk to the scale via the emulated serial port. Thanks for the information! Mar 26, 2011 8:10 PM. Apple Footer This site contains user submitted content, comments and opinions and is for informational purposes only. Apple may provide or recommend responses as a possible solution based on the information provided; every potential issue may involve several factors not detailed in the conversations captured in an electronic forum and Apple can therefore provide no guarantee as to the efficacy of any proposed solutions on the community forums. Apple disclaims any and all liability for the acts, omissions and conduct of any third parties in connection with or related to your use of the site.

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