Serial Communication with OpenOffice.org Basic

Hello Form Members,

I have purchased Jan's Serial Port Complete for help with our serial port programing. At my company, VRX Company Inc we have a factory test system for our product running the Openoffice.org basic macro language.

We are just not able to find good information on programing the serial port in this language. We have resorted to very very clumsy methods involving shelling out to Realterminal in order to get any data in or out of the COM ports. This method is very brittle so that when a unit testes abnormally it is highly likely it will crash our OpenOffice.org factory test system because the serial port never times out.

I really would like to be able to communicate bidirectionally with the unit under test and need some sort of time out if the unit under test fails to respond. Example: I want to test that the unit under test echo's back serial data sent to it. If no echo I have to have a time out so that my program does not hang waiting for a bad unit to echo.

Any ideas?

Forrest Erickson
President and floor sweeper
VRX Company Inc.
865-977-1242