Ethernet connection without having to deal with DLLs.

Hello all,

I am new to PMAC, we received new equipment running on a UMAC Turbo and I am suppose to write controlling software in Igor Pro as it is a custom built scientific equipment. But it is very difficult to get Igor talking to DLL files and I really didn't want to run a 20 meter serial cable waiting for noise to happen.

So I successfully did the following:

I used com0com to create two virtual com ports on my machine that are connected (whatever is sent here pops there and vice versa). I then wrote a little software in VB.NET that listens to one of these ports and transmits the message (and response) over to the UMAC via the ethernet cable using pcomserver DLL. Now my control codes in Igor pro would only need to talk to the other virtual comport created earlier and there you have it. Now am running an ethernet cable and my code see it as a regular COM port.

You can look at the attached image for a simple diagram.

The executable files, source code and com0com are attached. To run the executables you need to have Microsoft.NET Framework 4.5.2+ which can be found here:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=42642

I hope someone out there finds this useful.

Thank You.

PMAC_Repeater.zip