SERIAL / PARALLEL

just a quick post
how easy is it to communicate through a serial / parallel.
just for a future project

Im pretty sure the Winsock control will connect through Serial/Parallel ports to a given IP if there is one. I know it can be used to communicate over LAN as well as the web. Im not 100% certain on Serial/Parallel though. I dont have one so I cant test, but it would be interesting to know.

Winsock would only work if you'd already established a virtual network connection over the serial link.

If you want to do directly serial comms then you need to use the MSComm control.

It was really for a friend who wanted to make a computer controlled .......... to be controlled by pulses from the serial or parallel, so are there any commands to send pulses down the different pins, you don't need to look foir them just say if you know of any
thanx

I think thats a bit low level for VB... Vb would be more - connect to the "......." (whatever that is), and send it commands as strings. Sending pulses down specific pins is most likely a C or even ASM job...

whats ASM????
i've never heard of it

ASM = Assembler/Assembly language a.k.a Machine Code which is as low level as you can get I think, giving you control over memory addresses and such. Even lower level than the C language.

Technically assembler isn't machine code, although it is pretty close. Machine code is the binary codes representing different operations. Assembly code is mnemonic representation of machine code.

Basically assembler is one machine instruction to one ASM instruction. C and VB's most basic code can break down into several ASM statements.

It sounds like you don't actually want to establish a serial or parallel link, you just want to alter the bits on the port. This is quite easy to do with VB actually, there are several free libraries that you can get to read/write the input/output bits of the parallel port. Beware doing this in Windows NT though, it is considerably more difficult.