Digital IO API or ActiveX

[Earl T. Hackett Member Find all posts View Profile Close Earl T. Hackett]

For me it's finally coming down to crunch time. I have a Sea Level Systems 48 bit Digital IO board on a PCI bus (their part number 8005) that I have to interface with some custom hardware. I'll be pushing the DIO board and external hardware for all the speed I can get out of it. Over the last 12 months I have managed to get the user hardware and custom circuitry under control, but I have to get the system, including software, up and running by Nov 1.

Sea Level Systems provides a C API and an a VB ActiveX control to interface with their hardware. When the system is up an running the PC will be locked away in a secure location accessible to only the administrator. Users will interface with a variety of controls and indicators, not the PC.

I've been evaluating various languages and I would prefer to use PBCC for its speed. I have used a variety of BASIC languages over the years and the learning curve would be very short. Other considerations are Java (a bit of a learning curve), and VB (slow, bloated, and dead last on my list). I'm not experienced in C so that is pretty much out of the running given the time constraints.

Reading through the PBCC documentation, it looks like the C API would be the preferred approach to interfacing with the Sea Level hardware. I assume that I would use the DECLARE Statement and CDECL and the ALIAS to convert the full path name for the Sea Level API call to something more reasonable.

I just wanted to ask what other's experience has been in interfacing PBCC with external hardware.

[Michael Mattias Member Find all posts View Profile Close Michael Mattias]

>I assume that I would use the DECLARE Statement and CDECL and the ALIAS

If Sea Level provides an API in DLL form, converting the 'C' header files to PB DECLAREs is about all you would have to do to use it.

Of course, for those familiar with using COM components, using the PB COM Browser to create a header file from the type library and using that interface might be even easier.

That's the beauty of DLLs and the COM interface: they are both standard. That is, you can choose your application language based on factors other than the availability of the hardware interface.

[Bob Zale Creator of PowerBASIC Find all posts View Profile Close Bob Zale]

Earl--

Be assured there will be no problem at all with this interface. Either should work just fine.

Bob Zale
PowerBASIC Inc.