Serial communications activex

Similarly, if you are uploading a zipped archive, you should simply create a. ZIP file and not a self-extracting. Serial Communications Active X Demo. Posts Latest Activity Photos. Page of 1. Filtered by:. Previous template Next. Should also work in version 11 if you don't want to use it's built in. NET support and serial routines provided by. This sample script creates a Dialog box that allows the serial port parameters to be set and the port opened. Provision for sending commands and receiving text are provided.

With little work this dialog can be made modeless and can send text to forms and global variables etc. Tags: None. Re: Serial Communications Active X Demo Hey Paul, Im drowning here, This topic of serial port communication is killing me, Ive all over this board seeking the needed knowledge to send and receive data between my PC and mobile bar code scanner that scans product and logs the qty of each.

I was trying with Eltima Serial Port activeX, but they don't offer the support i need. I was very excited when I came across this post, and I was able to see the dialog ,set the port number and open the port, however nothing happened when i clicked on the "Send" button. I did download and install the suggested ActiveX. Would appreciate any assistance you can offer.

Comment Post Cancel. I too struggled with implementation Serial Communication in Alpha5. Their is a whole pile of stuff you need to get just right in order to get it to work.

Hardware, communication parameters, events in Alpha5, not to mention implementing a library in an environment it was never tested in, and no example code exist for. Anyone of these things can keep the whole thing from working.

My advice to anyone trying this it is to keep it as simple as possible at first, and as you get the basic stuff working add more to the whole. This program is your friend when dealing with serial interfaces. You will see lots of examples on the internet showing hyperterm being used to debug serial interfaces.

Hyperterm is used in these examples because it came with windows no other reason, certainly not because it works for this purpose. Learn Real Term and use it for testing, I cannot stress this enough. Time is valuable. Developing communication software with the SuperCom serial communication ActiveX is extremely easy and starts by placing the ActiveX icon on a Windows Form.

The SuperCom ActiveX also provides intelligent functions that considerably speed-up the development process and produce fast, reliable solutions avoiding delaying or blocking of your application. No matter if data monitoring, receiving complex data packets or complex data transmission protocols, establishing connections or file transfer. It can run without any special accord optimized and transparently in background thus enabling the application to execute fast and smooth.

Applications using the SuperCom ActiveX can work event driven. The reported events enable the application to manage other tasks simultaneously while communications or file transfer last. The enhanced event reporting mechanism in SuperCom ActiveX enables you to receive events on any defined character e. The SuperCom ActiveX also supports the polling mode of operation. This means to obtain with methods and properties the state of the status lines and to check the data flow for communication errors without the need to react on events.

No matter which mode of operation the application is using, SuperCom will always perform serial data communication on multiple ports or connections simultaneously and in background. High speed file transfers tasks are very easy to accomplish. In fact, these protocols are running very stable since One library, one API! Read More.

Lengthy functions like file transfer, connecting, observing the data stream for special data packets or strings, and many other, are working in background while your application is performing other tasks. With SuperCom, Your application does not "freeze" waiting on a lengthy function to complete. Example 1 The following briefly shows a simple example of the control operation using Visual Basic. SuperCom ActiveX will do the rest. Example SCom. This function also serves some programming languages that cannot handle binary data directly.

In that case one can provide the binary data as hex string. A very frustrating issue especially when it happens on customer site. That is very easy to avoid with the SuperCom ActiveX. SuperCom controls the serial hardware in a way that it behaves nearly the same independently from the actual speed baud rate. The method used ensures that no time is spending without doing something productive.

Thus it increases the data throughput and does it's job transparent to the application with low CPU load. Forget time-outs and data errors when capturing GPS data. Event driven sample available. The DEMO programs demonstrate that. When using a SuperCom package with x64 support and a x64 capable compiler e. Visual Studio and later it's possible to create Bit applications.

Yes, easily. An example spreadsheet build with Excel x64 is available. From the beginning compatible with the MSComm including way more functions, free technical support, real world samples, continuous enhancements and optimizations as new operating systems and development environment appear. The SuperCom ActiveX was from start the alternative for pro's needed a faster and more stable data communication solution.

Replacing the unmarshaled pointer with the managed variable as a reference parameter seems to work, but it may just be luck that the memory has not been reused. Depending on timing, more than one character may be waiting, so the queue is drained one character at a time using ReadFile repeatedly and calling the virtual function OnRxChar with each character.

Error handling and exceptions need to be carefully considered when using worker threads. Any unhandled exceptions that occur in ReceiveThread, any of the virtual methods called from it, and any methods or events called or fired from any of these will propagate up and be handled by the catch clause.

If the exception is not ThreadAbortException, it is stored in a private member of CommBase and the thread is then terminated.

The next time the application code invokes a method on the primary thread, the exception is raised again and the port is closed. This makes good use of the inner exception mechanism since a generic "Receive Thread Fault" is raised, containing a reference to the original stored exception. ThrowException is provided as a helper method for use in derived classes; it adjusts its behavior according to which thread it is called on.

I read all the configurable settings from a helper object of class CommBaseSettings. Open acquires this object by calling the virtual method CommSettings and then copies the values into the API structures.

CommBaseSettings also provides methods for saving and restoring settings to XML configuration files and for applying common settings scenarios in bulk. I provide documentation for the settings in the form of IntelliSense help. This design provides an extensible settings infrastructure since derived classes can provide their own settings class that inherits from CommBaseSettings.

SetupComm requests sizes for the reception and transmission queues. Normally you can just set these to zero and the operating system decides, but it may be worth adjusting the requested size for some file transfer and similar applications.

There is no guarantee that the system will honor this request; in Windows XP, there appears to be a dynamic transmission queue and only the reception queue length is honored. SetCommState supplies the settings for baud rate, word format, and handshake settings in a structure called the device control block DCB. The reception timeouts are not useful in the design I have chosen because individual characters are processed asynchronously.

If a reception timeout is required, then it needs to be implemented at a higher level for example, CommLine provides a timeout for its Transact method. The transmission timeouts are useful, however, for multibyte sends. The number of bytes in the send is multiplied by the sendTimeoutMultiplier and then sendTimeoutConstant is added to this to give the total time allowed in milliseconds. Once the port is opened and configured, Open invokes a virtual method AfterOpen, which may be overridden to check the status of the connection to the remote device and possibly also to configure it.

If this returns false, the port will be closed again and Open itself will return false. There is also a BeforeClose method for shutting down the remote device if necessary.

CommBase provides two overloaded versions of Send, one taking a byte array and the other taking a single byte. CommLine provides a third version of Send, taking a string.

All of these ultimately use the byte array version after appropriate data conversion. There is also a SendImmediate method taking a single byte. This sends the byte ahead of any other bytes in the transmission queue and may be useful for implementing custom flow control schemes. GetQueueStatus returns a QueueStatus object, giving the size and content of the transmission and reception queues and what, if any, flow control condition is currently blocking transmission. This turned out to be a nontrivial but perfectly feasible exercise.

Finally, I have a confession to make. Remember: you just might be spending all your free time writing brand new classes from scratch when just what you needed already existed. Check your local hardware store before reinventing the wheel. On this principle, I hope that the base classes developed here will help other programmers bring RS device communications into the.

NET world. For background information see:. John Hind is an independent author and consultant living and working in London, England. He specializes in microcontroller applications and control solutions.