Programming for the RF Terminal
The four levels of programming support offered for the RF Terminal are:
• Low Level ASCII sequences sent to and from the Base Station by the user program reading/writing to
the serial port.
• Low Level ASCII sequences sent to and from the Base Station using DLL for Windows for serial port
reading/writing.
• Active X drop-in components. Every necessary function is defined. You just complete the code for each
function.
• TCP/IP Active X drop-in components used by the “Server” computer to communicate with the “Client”
computer that has the Base Station(s) attached.
LOW Level ASCII sequences directly
Planning
Remember, plan for every error that the Base Station might return including:
Sequence Errors detected
Illegal Command detected
Base Station Initialization detected
Addressing a Terminal Not Signed In detected
Command without an ID
Programs can be written in any language that has access to the serial port (reading/writing), regardless of the
platform. No more than one Base Station is allowed for each serial port.
Host to Terminal Programming
The basic format of a message that is transmitted from Host to Base to Terminal is fairly simple:
Byte position Function Possible values
1 RF Terminal ID 0-9, A-Z, a-z, - =
2+ Command(s) **
Last Termination of message EOT (ASCII 4)
The RF Terminal ID is always the first byte and always only 1 character in length. There are 64 different
possible values - 0-9 , A-Z, a-z, - and =.
The Command(s) section of the message always starts with the second byte and can consist of one or more
commands - including data to be displayed or voice messages to be broadcast.
The last byte is always ASCII 4 (EOT) to terminate the message.