From: Luis Lavena <luislavena@...>
Date: 2006-04-19T08:40:03+09:00
Subject: Re: Win32 Serial Communications, maybe using mscomm.ocx

John,

I'll suggest you avoid using mscomm.ocx for many reasons:

First, the overhead of interfacing with OLE/ActiveX/IDispatcher objects 
form plain ruby code.

Second, the microsoft control developer license, forbids its use outside 
any of the VB packages where it was shipped, so you will be "breaking 
the law" using it :-P

Third, why?

Are your serial label using CS and DS control lines for handshake? you 
need to control them from your code to set/get your printer status from 
your code?

for reference, past weeks I needed replace some buggy code from a VB 
project that use MSCOMM control and we found its baddly based on ActiveX 
event-driven model, which isn't suited for high speed (any speed above 
19200).

We replaced it with a custom dll made with FreeBASIC 
http://www.freebasic.net and reduced latencies to the minimum, just 30k 
of compiled dll... and solved the problem.

You even could interface it with Ruby using DL.

That just my suggestion of course.

If you need more inside information I'll glad to provide some guidance.

Regards,

Luis

John Johnson wrote:
> Hello All,
> 
> It's good to get back to the RT Mailing List!
> 
> <terse>
> I'm looking for examples of using the mscomm control with this code:
> http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/35355
> </terse>
> 
> I'm working on a project that drives a serial label printer on a
> Windows host.
> I've been trying ruby-serialport-0.6 by Guillaume Pierronnet and Alan
> Stern.
> It works as long as no handshaking is needed, i.e. as long as I send
> data slower than the printer can print, it works. The problem is, I
> need to speed things up. At 4 seconds a label, a couple of thousand
> labels a day really adds up (~ 2 hrs).
> 
> I found the aforementioned message about using the mscomm control from
> VB, I'm not to well versed on recent Win programming, but I assume this
> is mscomm.ocx.
> 
> The code looks good, does anyone know where I can find examples of it's
> use?
> 
> ADVthanksANCE!
> 
> Regards,
>    JJ
> 
> ---
> Help everyone. If you can't do that, then at least be nice.


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