6-1
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
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 =.
