Tutorial on data communication with Windows??

Forum 2005-2010 (read only) Software Syntax & Programs
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Tutorial on data communication with Windows??

I'm an absolute beginning with Arduino, but am interested in getting started. What I want to do is read a voltage level into a BASIC program on Windows. I read the Arduino introduction about getting started with Windows, and the very helpful screen shots showed how to program an Arduino from Windows via the USB port.

But I haven't found a similar explanation (with screen shots......) of how to read data from an Arduino into a BASIC program. I'm hoping that somebody has already done a tutorial about how to do this. I”m not concerned at this point about the hardware details of actually detecting the voltage level. There seems to be a lot of examples and explanation about that. What I am concerned about is how to transmit the voltage level data (in ASCII, I assume??) back to the BASIC program on the computer.

Please direct me to any tutorial that might exist about data communication between the computer and the Arduino after it has been programmed. And if there is some easier way to get data from the Arduino into the computer, please let me know what it is.

And if this question demonstrates my level of ignorance, I apologize in advance.

Thanks for any suggestions.

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What flavor of basic?

I've done something like this for giggles with visual basic (after downloading way too much stuff from MS):

Module Module1
'based on http://support.microsoft.com/kb/904795/
Sub Main()
Using comport As IO.Ports.SerialPort = _
My.Computer.Ports.OpenSerialPort("COM4")
Do
Dim Incoming As String = comport.ReadLine()
If Incoming Is Nothing Then
Exit Do
Else
Console.WriteLine(Incoming)
End If
Loop
comport.Close()
End Using

Console.WriteLine("Press ENTER to quit")
Console.ReadLine()
End Sub

End Module

OF course you can use the java example too without downloading anything else.

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Thanks, DCB, for your reply. I've just started using Freebasic, described at: http://www.freebasic.net/
It's very simple, works like a charm, and seems easier than Visual Basic (although I didn't try to use Visual Basic ). I"m not quite sure how/whether freeBasic can read IO ports, but I"ll figure that out. I assume some initial Arduino program is also needed.

Thanks again for your response.

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