Active7 months ago
What is the best way to access a serial port from VBA?
Accessing SERIAL Port from Excel VBA. Common Basic statements of OPEN. Excel VBA application: Porting to Visual Studio 2005? How to read serial port data in Excel 2007. An example how to place the StrokeReader serial port ActiveX on Excel 2007. Paste the following code into Visual Basic.
I have a need for some of our sales reps to be able to send a simple string over the serial port from an action button in PowerPoint. I don't commonly use VBA, especially for anything like this. Normally I would turn it into an application of some sort, but I actually don't think the idea is that bad. It will be a handy tool for them to demo this device with while on a projector and talking to other sales guys and non technical people. Also, this sales guy will have no problem making small modifications to the VBA or PowerPoint presentation, but would not do as well with recompiling a .NET application.
Using ActiveXperts Serial Port Component with VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) ActiveXperts Serial Port Component is a software development kit (SDK) that enables the user to communicate to a device over a serial interface. I need to create a button in Excel to read data in from serial port. Read from Serial port to Excel. Reading Serial Communication Visual Studios.
I know we could do it through a batch file run from the presentation on the action, but that doesn't make me very happy. I figure we could probably access a COM object and run from there, but again I am not real up on the latest and greatest libraries to use in VBA, and it would also be nice to get a quick little primer in how to easily open, send and close the connection.
Since this will need to be run on multiple people's computers, it would be nice if it would be easily transportable to other machines. I should be able to say it has to run on Office 2007 and Windows XP. Compatibility with anything else would be a nice bonus though.
How should I go about handling this? Any good tips or tricks? Library recommendations?
GEOCHET
Visual Basic Excel
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3 Answers
The Win32 API handles the serial port as a file. You can access the serial ports directly by calling these API functions from within VBA. I had to do this for an old .NET application but VBA is no different.
Rather than hash it out for you on this site, here's a reference I've hung onto over the years. How to perform serial port communications in VBA
Some CanuckSome Canuck
This works for me. I'm not sure if the OPEN actually sets up the Baud rate, as I first used TeraTerm.My COM port is a USB connection to a BASYS3 prototyping kit. It is spewing characters at 9600, records of 36 characters ending with CR. I can randomly send commands of 9 characters. In the above code, I generate these command strings every time I have received a new line.The way I chose which character to send is a little clunky: perhaps a better way is to have a character pointer and a number of characters, and when those go equal to set them both to zero.
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Jeff KaylinJeff Kaylin
Here is a brief module of VBA code that can send and receive messages on a PC serial port. This is not very elegant, but it is simple and should work on modern versions of Excel and Windows.
You are left on your own to expand the functionality and store or parse the messages. This just shows the low-level stuff to deal with the serial port.
The first 5 lines declare the millisecond 'Sleep' library function (based on Excel version).
Visual C++ Serial Port Example
The SerialPort() subroutine outlines the steps to open the port, transmit some data, receive some data, try again to receive some data (to show that it really does not run afoul of the 'end of file' error), and close the port.
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