hello Jim.

Thanks for your reply. i am going to read all of the links you provided.
i ahve heard about RTS and DTR, CTS and DSR before here at ut (i think maby from one of your posts). Now, i kind'a belive it must be possible to control each and every pin on a com port - there has got to be a way. maybe the only way would be to write a dll in c++ or so, i don't know. maybe there is already such a dll which could be used in fox.

my thinking here is this: a comm port has 9 pins (i think). there are probable 1 for ground, and 1 to provide power - so that leave me with 7. if i can control those 7 pins i could sen a binary number to those which would give me 127 posibilities. or if i work with a 'set-bit' i would have 63. i then would need electronics to translate that number.

like i said, i have no clue how the 'big-boys' do it, but there has got to be a way.

thanks again.

>Hi Gunnar,
>
>First, a few links for you:
>
>http://www.camiresearch.com/Data_Com_Basics/RS232_standard.html#anchor1154232
>http://www.quatech.com/support/comm-over-rs-232.php
>http://www.tisd.net/~harveybppp/relay.html
>
>If you really want to play around with this, start Googling for RS232 and ham radio stuff - they have been doing things like this for years. About the only pins available for you to directly control are the RTS and DTR outputs (RTSEnable and DTREnable). These you can set the state directly, and they will hold. You can test input states of CTS and DSR to detect their presence (CTSHolding and DSRHolding). As far as sending characters to perform actions, you would need external electronics to capture/decipher and act on the data.
>
>When you really want to start having fun, look at http://www.parallax.com/html_pages/resources/index.asp - these Basic Stamps are a blast.