Harald,

On Tue, 27 Sep 2005 13:04:20 -0700 (PDT), Harold Hallikainen wrote:

> I'm wondering about a cheap and dirty way to get a Windoze GUI for PIC
> projects. Is there any way to direct a URL request from a browser to a
> COMM port? Say, instead of the http:// or file:// prefix, we did a com1://
> prefix (perhaps a URL of com1://mydevice/analog?chan=1).

You have to stick to the format of a URL - the part before the // is the *protocol* not any sort of address - 
com1 is an address.  If you were going to do something like this there would need to be a new protocol defined 
(let's call it "ser:" for serial! :-)

So you would have something like:

 ser://com1.mymachine/analog?chan=1

where:
 "com1" is the name of a serial port
 "mymachine" is the name of the machine the port is fitted to, and could be omitted if it's the machine you 
are running on
 "analog" and "chan" (and anything else beyond the final slash) are interpreted by the device on the serial 
port.

Serial ports are generally single devices, but there's nothing to stop you adding further layers of addressing 
where the serial device connects onwards to other devices, say on a CAN bus, so you could have:

 ser://com1/CAN04/temp1?read

if say you wanted device number 4 on the CAN bus to read temperature 1 and return the result, all accessed via 
the serial port.

Now, just watch someone go and spoil the idea...  :-)

Cheers,


Howard Winter
St.Albans, England


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