Windows Serial Port Communication

[physiphile]

Hey,

I’m wanting to send commands to a motor and servo controller via the serial port on a windows based machine. I’ve downloaded source code for serial port communication, but it’s mostly high level (i.e. sending strings not characters or bytes). Does anyone know where I can download source code for simple serial communication (VB or VC++) to have control over sending just the bits I want without appending other stuff to the beginning and end of the packet?

I realize I could probably map the strings being sent to certain hex values, but I figured you guys may have a more straight forward way of accomplishing this.

Thanks,
Andy

[Ben]

Hi Andy,

Serial communication using .NET is pretty easy. I don’t have any VB or VC++ examples, but I can point you to some VC# examples that you can hopefully convert to VB or VC++ without too much trouble:

• Pololu Serial Transmitter Utility: a Windows application that lets you easily send byte packets from 1 to 6 bytes in length. This is useful for quickly testing and troubleshooting your controllers.
• Tutorial on using the Pololu servo controller in .NET: Colin Karpfinger wrote this tutorial, which provides a very simple sample C# program for sending commands (raw bytes) to the Pololu serial servo controllers.
• Sample C# program for communicating with the TReX and TReX Jr motor controllers: this sample program is probably more complicated than anything you need since there are a few subtleties involved in serial communication with the TReX motor controller, but you can extract the basic serial byte-transmitting and receiving portions and use them in your own application.

Please let me know if you have any trouble adapting these examples for your own use.

- Ben