Hi guys I am starting to build an automation system for my room. I am starting with low current leds and 12 volt control with a transistor. I want to design a gui with visual basic that communicates with the serial port to turn things on and off. I was looking into using firmatavb but my own design. I can build the basic form but I do not know how to do serial stuff yet. Any help is appreciated ty.
I'm pretty sure VB has fairly robust serial communications support. You may want to dig around the msdn developer library to understand its functionality. From there, I believe it's just a matter of telling your various VB controls to send the appropriate serial command over USB to the Arduino.
You should also consider using processing for it. Does it have to be written in VB? Processing is based on java, and has a big serial library that can easily communicate with the arduino.
Processing is also VERY good at drawing stuff, so it would be ideal for making a nice GUI. An extra feature it has (and a particularly useful one), is that you can save a pre-compiled program and run it when you want, as oppose to compiling it whenever you want to use it.
Onions.
Processing is very good at drawing things but won't provide you objects such as buttons sliding bars etc. There are user created libraries that do those things but maybe you like the classic look of what VB has. Anyway since Processing is Java, you can use Java Swing elements to make dialogs. I've made several of data download and info display in Processing using swing for my arduino projects. It's been a while though. Opening serial on processing is easy.
That's the reason I want to use visual basic. I'm going to look around for stuff about serial communication. I started adding the controls and other stuff to the application.
Besides hosting the UI on a PC, you can also develop a text-based UI on the arduino so you get a standalone system like this: