• Introduction
  
• COMM-DRV/NT & Windows 2000 SP2
  
• Tip Of The Month
  

It has been three months since our last newsletter. We have tabulated your suggestions and plan to incorporate many into our products. Keep the suggestions coming.  Please send them to suggestions@wcscnet.com.

Within a few weeks we will be releasing a new product called COMM-DRV++. The product is a very simple to use class library that will allow adding serial functionality to any application very quickly. Check our website periodically for its release.

If you own out COMM-DRV/NT product, be sure to read the section COMM-DRV/NT & Windows 2000 SP2.

About a week ago we started receiving emails from customers using COMM-DRV/NT who upgraded to Windows 2000 Service Pack 2 (SP2). They noticed that if they closed a port, it would fail with an error 45 (out of resources) when attempting to reopen the port.  We immediately built a test bed and discovered that SP2 fixed a Microsoft bug that allowed PCI resources to be reused without returning an error to the driver. Our driver was modified to take this into account.

Visit the website at http://www.wcscnet.com/CdrvNTSupportQuestions[0006].htm to get the latest version of COMM-DRV/NT that has the above fix. The password remains the same as the original v18.1. If you have an earlier version of COMM-DRV/NT, you can purchase an upgrade at http://www.wcscnet.com/order.htm.

Many of you have purchased COMM-DRV/NT and COMM-DRV/VxD in order to add reliable multidrop serial communication and/or time stamping of serial data to your applications. The following snippet of code in both VisualBasic and C/C++ illustrates the ease of  implementing these with either our RS485 cards or with standard RS232 ports with RS485 converters. Note that the examples do not include any error checking (which you should perform in mission critical applications), nor any application specific protocol/algorithm.

//Initialize the driver
Status = WCSCVxDInit()

//Open the serial port for multidrop operation
PortId = WCSCVxDOpenPort(0,0x2a0,5,0,0,
MULTIDROP,0)

//Set Baud rate, etc
Status=WCSCVxDSetPortCharateristics(PortId,……..)

//Enable RTS to turn on transmitter
WCSCVxDRtsOn(PortId)

//Output the packet. The RTS signal will drop as soon
//as the last byte leaves the UART without clipping.
Count = WCSCVxDPutPacket(Port,Len(Packet),Packet)

//Wait for response

//Get response
Status = WCSCVxDGetPacket(PortId,MaxLen,InPacket)


//When done close port
Status = WCSCVxDCleanup(PortId)

//Initialize the driver
Status = WCSCVxDInit();

//Open the serial port for multidrop operation
Status = WCSCVxDOpenPort(0,0x2a0,5,0,0,MULTIDROP,0);

/Set Baud rate, etc
Status=WCSCVxDSetPortCharateristics(PortId,……..);

//Enable RTS to turn on transmitter
WCSCVxDRtsOn(PortId);

//Output the packet. The RTS signal will drop as soon
//as the last byte leaves the UART without clipping.
Count = WCSCVxDPutPacket(Port,Len(Packet),Packet);

//Wait for response

//Get response
Status = WCSCVxDGetPacket(PortId,MaxLen,InPacket);


//When done close port
Status = WCSCVxDCleanup(PortId);