Newbie: Can I do this with PB?

[Guest]

Hi,

I used PB3 a view years ago together with PBDK. As I have seen,
how easy programming can be with VB I switched to VB4 & VB5.

But now I have a problem which I cannot solve with VB and I am
looking around for a way to come out of this situation:

I have to monitor 24 Input-Lines from a multi-i/o-card which
gives the states of the lines to different adresses 3Ports/3Bits.

If the trigger-line is high I have to look at the other 23 lines
(adresses) and save their states.

During a period of 200ms I will receive 32 trigger-impulses.

Can I directly access these I/O-Ports fast enough, that I don't
loose any signals?

Is this possible with PB or do I have the same Windows-limitations
than I have with VB?

THX in advance
Herbert


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[Gregery D Engle]

Herbert,

I've done some work with the DBK2000, DBK12 from IoTech. You should be
able to do everything your wanting with PB with no problem at
all *IF* your provider offers an SDK kit.

IoTech offered a C++ SDK kit that I converted to PB for the
functions that I needed. I did have problems reading analog
inputs with PB, so I purchased an application from CEC called
TestPoint. TestPoint has drivers for almost all IO Boards and
offers native support for IoTech boards as well. It has its own
OOP language and offers direct support for DLLs (which I used
PB for) Developement with Testpoint takes very long but it was
nice using my custom DLLs.

I'm sure if I had more development time on this project I could of
completed everything in PB, it just took so long converting the
SDK's over.



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-Greg

[Tom Hanlin]

PowerBASIC is certainly fast enough, but Windows' multitasking design
may get in the way, especially if you expect other applications to be
running at the same time. This is the sort of application where,
ironically, you can expect much better performance under a bare DOS
operating system than under Windows. Barring that, it may need to be
written as a Windows driver (or NT service), which may not be done
in BASIC.

The bottom line? A firm "maybe!" The only way to be sure is to try it.

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Tom Hanlin
PowerBASIC Staff