anthony lorelli
With No Definite Future And No Purpose Other Than To Prevail Somehow ...[The Mermen, A Glorious Lethal Euphoria]

Friday, May 10, 2002

Something that the .NET framework is good for: machine control software in a manufacturing environment. Just spent the last several days writing a program to control a machine we custom built for cutting large batches of hosing. With the inclusion of a decent timer in the .NET class library and the ability to wrap DLL functions in class methods, VB.NET was suddenly an appropriate choice for the job. The hose cutter machine is connected to an old P200 via the parallel port. The control program uses Craig Peacock's PortTalk driver to enable access to the port under Win2000, wrapped in a ParallelPort class with simple read() and write() methods. We ran our first test of the machine yesterday - and the only problem we're facing so far is slippage in the feed mechanism. 10:24:25 AM    comment []