Serial Port Access in VB
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I wanted to know whether it is possible to access individual pins of a serial port using the MSComm control in VB.I want to interface the Pc with an ADC card, and need to know whether it is possible to send Start _of_Conversion pulse to the ADC using the MSComm control. I'm using this for real time data acquisition.So I wanted to know whether it is a good idea to use the serial port in the first place. :confused:
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I wanted to know whether it is possible to access individual pins of a serial port using the MSComm control in VB.I want to interface the Pc with an ADC card, and need to know whether it is possible to send Start _of_Conversion pulse to the ADC using the MSComm control. I'm using this for real time data acquisition.So I wanted to know whether it is a good idea to use the serial port in the first place. :confused:
Is the ADC card external to the PC? If the MSComm control has control of the DTR / DSR lines, then you can use one those to pulse the serial port. As to the real-time aspect, that depends upon how fast you need the real-time acquisition to take place. A serial port is deterministic in that it can move data at a constant rate, but Windows is not a real-time operating system, so it may take time to receive that data. If you only need a few conversions per second, then you should be fine, depending on how much data there is to move.