Labview, serial port, PPP

[Flavien]

Hi,


I'm facing the following issue :
I need to communicate with a third party device by doing the
following (using labview on NT4) :
1) Send it some data with a serial port in "raw" mode.
2) Get some data in return
3) Open a PPP connection to the device (over the serial port)
4) Talk to it through the PPP connection
5) Close the PPP connection

Is this doeable ? I've not seen anything about starting a
ppp connection from labview anywhere yet. Any examples
anyone ?
Is it possible to switch the serial port from raw mode to
ppp and back without trouble ? Any experience on the subject ?



Thanks,


Flavien.

[mikeporter]

To do what you need to do certainly possible, but will be difficult in that you will have to write the protocol drivers for the PPP connection yourself--though you might find a set of drivers someone else wrote. The good news is that the protocol is well documented:

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1331.txt

The bad news is that the referenced document is a decade old and there have been numerious extensions made to the original protocol. Hence, you will probibly need to get and understand the protocol in a fair amount of detail even if you get someone's drivers.

For more research into this do an Alta-Vista search for "point-to-point protocol" (including the quotation marks).

Note that the serial port doesn't know (or typically care) what the format of the
data passing through it is. So there really isn't any shifting between "modes" as such.

What instrument are you trying to talk to?

Mike...
mporter@arielcorp.com

[Flavien]

Hi,


When I was talking about "switching modes", I was thinking

*) "pilot the serial port directly from labview bit-by-bit"

as opposed to :

*) "let some kind of ppp driver built in some network
layer of Windows use the serial port, and talk to the
tested-device from labview through this connection".

As a side-effect, I would have to start/stop the ppp driver
from labview... That's why I'm pretty concerned by the
"switch" thing. Isn't the ppp driver that is used by the
dial-up process useable for other applications ?


Flavien.

mikeporter wrote:
>
> To do what you need to do certainly possible, but will be difficult in
> that you will have to write the protocol drivers for the PPP
> connection yourself--though you might find a set of drivers someone
>
else wrote. The good news is that the protocol is well documented:
>
> http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1331.txt
>
> The bad news is that the referenced document is a decade old and there
> have been numerious extensions made to the original protocol. Hence,
> you will probibly need to get and understand the protocol in a fair
> amount of detail even if you get someone's drivers.
>
> For more research into this do an Alta-Vista search for
> "point-to-point protocol" (including the quotation marks).
>
> Note that the serial port doesn't know (or typically care) what the
> format of the data passing through it is. So there really isn't any
> shifting between "modes" as such.

[mikeporter]

The problem with the existing PPP apps is that they were written assuming that you are connecting to the internet. I'm not sure whether you can use them as a generic io interface...

Mike...