I am using Arduino to send the output of 4 RFID readers to a Flash application running on a computer terminal. This is a museum exhibit so needs to boot automatically when the power is switched on. Currently I have a short-cut to a batch file in the start-up folder which first starts the serproxy and then starts the Flash application, but when the Flash program starts it doesn't read the port. If I escape the Flash program and open the Arduino serial connection or use the program "putty" I can see the output from Arduino (the RFID tag numbers) coming through fine, and then if I quit that and re-open Flash it works. However we can't do this everytime we want to start the thing. It needs to automatically boot up.
How can I get it to start up and work straight away?
sounds more like a flash question then an arduino. Does the flash program automatically open the serial port? Does the arduino wait for some sort of activation bit to be sent to it before returning data to the pc?
could be many things, if it were vb i could be more help.
Thanks for your reply Rob, and sorry for the long silence. I've got my exhibit working OK now, although I'm still not really sure what the problem was. It seam that if one of the RFID readers was sending data as the program tried to start that that would in some way cause the Arduino program to crash. Anyway, the solution I came up with was simply to wire up a reset button for the board so that once everything had booted up, if it wasn't reading the serial data then pressing the button made the Arduino restart and everything worked.