I am looking at buying an arduino usb board to control my small projects but I have hit a sort of snag. I can program in the arduino language but I really want to be able to control the board from a visual basic 6 app.
I know how to control a com port in vb6 so that’s not a problem but my question is if you program the arduino board to wait for some sort of data over the com port in the arduino language can I send that data from a vb6 application and have them work together or does the data have to come specifically from the arduino program?
I’m an AVR and C expert, but I’ve not used Arduino, it being those two things. Essentially, your AVR chip has to have your program setup the serial port at the same baud rate, etc., as your VB6 program. Then the AVR and the VB6 program have to agree on how data is going to be formatted and sent, each way, i.e., a protocol. This can be ASCII text only, or can be 8 bit bytes. Easiest is text-only, with numbers sent as text, e.g., “123” or “456.789” and each end converts these text numbers to integers or floats in the native format of that compiler and computer.
Prerequisite: the RS32 connection between the Arduino board and the PC’s serial port or USB-to-serial adapter has to be correct in terms of the horridly confusing DTE and DCE. Hint: The PC is DTE.