Controling remote serial ports

[Sean Reminga]

Hello,

I have a piece of equipment that will communicate via rs-232 connected
to a computer. I need to be able to communicate with that piece of
equimpment via a remote computer. The two computers are connected on
a win2k peer to peer network. I have set up a RDA server so that I
can control the remote computers DAQ cards, but RDA does not allow me
to control the NI PCI-232/4 card (at least I do not believe so).

In short I need to configure, write to, and read from a com port on a
remote computer via a TCP/IP connection.

Thank you for any help,

Sean Reminga
Purdue Undergraduate Student
PRIME LAB
http://primelab.physics.purdue.edu/
e-mail: reminga@purdue.edu

[Labviewguru]

Sean,

Just set up a TCP listener on the computer with the serial port. Setup the listener to be able to parse commands (i.e. everything that starts with "^serial:" would be addressed to the serial port. You can have the caller of the listener open and configure the serial port, any traffic to the serial port would go through the listener and be routed to the serial port. Any traffic FROM the serial port would be routed to the TCP client on your remote system.

[JeanPierre]

Sean,

the latest version of VISA allows to connect to serial ports of a remote computer where the VISA server is running. However, the last time I've heard of that feature, it was incompatible with RDA e.g. you can't use Remote VISA and RDA simultaneously.

Like Labviewguru wrote, it is quite straightforward to code a remote serial server using TCP port. The server forwards incoming data from TCP connection to serial port and data incoming from serial port to TCP connection.

[Labviewguru]

Jean-Pierre,

Thanks for that tidbit, I wasn't aware of that feature in VISA, though now that I think about it, I do remember seeing that somewhere...

Thanks!