Chapter 6

Programming for the RF Terminal

The four levels of programming support offered for the RF Terminal are:

1)Low Level ASCII sequences sent to and from the Base Station by the user program reading/writing to the serial port.

2)Low Level ASCII sequences sent to and from the Base Station using DLL for Windows for serial port reading/writing.

3)Active X drop-in components. Every necessary function is defined. You just complete the code for each function.

4)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

1

2+ Last

Function

Possible values

RF Terminal ID

0-9, A-Z, a-z, - =

Command(s)

**

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 =.

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Worth Data 701 RF manual Programming for the RF Terminal, LOW Level Ascii sequences directly, Planning