Driver for Weigh Machine

We have a weigh machine installed at our store which weighs the cartons arrived at the store. The machine is AD-4326 A weigh machine and and has a serial interfacing with a PC. Right now the machine is working fine with our DOS based FoxPro program. We enter the trolly # and other information and press enter the weight of carton is inserted in Database.But now we want to switch to Windows based program i.e. V FoxPro.

We adapted the same technique but its not working. Do we need a windows based driver for this machine or we can use the existing driver or any other way to get the weight entered into the Database

Your DOS program probably reads a string of ASCII text from the scale via COM port, parses out the useful number and stores it in the database. In Visual Basic there is a widget called the MSCOMM control which allows communication with COM1 which would allow you to read a string. Not sure if FoxPro has the same, but that would be a good place to start.

There is a company with a product called Software Wedge which specializes in wierd serial interfaces.

http://www.taltech.com/TALtech_web/products/winwedge.html

I've never used it, but it has been around a long time and looks quite good.

Brian Lee Mast, P.E.
Trippel/Mast Consulting LLC
Seattle, Washington
(206) 652-8485
[email protected]

Hello

What version of windows do you use ? In DOS, the serial port can be accessed directly using portin and port-out commands. On windows 95/98 ports can be accessed similar to DOS. But on Windows NT and 2000, there is no way to directly access the serial port ( or any port for that matter) - one needs to use the given Win32 API for serial communication. I believe this is the problem you must be facing. There is no way but to rewrite the serial comm part using win32 APIs. I will be happy to assist in doing this for you. Kindly send me more details of the FOXPRO program you are using it with - especially the communication parts ( more precisely the code that executes when you press enter for the weight) - that will help me stick to the same calls and make it work for you.

You can contact me directly on [email protected]

regards
Punita

Habib:
Judging from your description of the problem, it sounds like you are using Windows NT, 2000 or XP. These systems require you to use the OS for comm port communications as they all "virtualize" the hardware. In essence, this means that user programs can not directly access the hardware the way you could with DOS (and Windows 98/Windows 95). So the short answer is that you will need to
write a Windows based driver to talk to this device.

Ron Gage