Communicating to an ANORAD Controller from LabVIEW through COM1 Serial port.

[Yuliya Vladimirov]

I am trying to communicate to an ANORAD controller through LabVIEW. This contoller is kind of old and came with some software that uses ACSPL (ACS Programming Language). I am trying to communicate to the controller directly without going through this software. I have established a COM1 port connection but I cannot get a controller to work. This controller came with a Sotware Guide which has a section on "Communicating from a Host Computer". It states there that if a command from a terminal (controller's software) for Setting X's Wait Time to 50 msec is "SXWT50" (=carriage return), then a command from host computer is "SXWT <0H><0H><0H><32H> <88H>" (<0H><0H><0H><32
H> is 50 in binary format, <88H> is a checksum, and H stands for Hexidecimal). The checksum is calculated by using ASCII representation for those characters by first taking their sum and then taking a modulus 256 of that sum:
(83+88+87+84+0+0+0+50)mod256=392mod256=136=88H.
At first it seemed pretty easy, but now when I put that command into LabVIEW nothing works as it should. I tried putting an array of ASCII characters that correspond to each of the letters of the command but it still does not work. What is the right string(or should I say the right format) to give to the Serial Write VI?

[Rob Cole]

The input to the serial write is a string. You can use "\" characters in the string. So, to send hexadecimal characters, try "\00\00\00\32\88\n". Where the "\n" is the newline character. Give it a try and I hope that this works for you.

Rob