Harold Hallikainen writes:
 > 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). Instead of
 > sending the request out to the specified IP address over ethernet, it'd
 > send the GET or POST request out the specified EIA232 port. Our PIC would
...

	Not exactly what you're asking for, but a web server
supporting cgi-bin scripts (apache) or possibly some other form of
server side scripting (php, mod-perl, mod-python) would allow URLs
somethin like:

    http://localhost/cgi-bin/pic-wacker?port=com1?func=analog?chan=1

	This has the advantage of being a real URL, so if you wound up
using a tool where you had to choose from a spin-box for the protocol
(http, ftp, file, etc.) you wouldn't get stuck because it doesn't know
a protocol called com1.

	Another possibility is that the Python distribution
(python.org, free), and I'm sure other tools like perl, comes with (or
has available) a relativly small web server implementation in that
language.  It could easily be modified to apply suitable GET or POST
requests, with whatever filtering/munging that you want, to com ports.
You would still use an ordinary URL such as I suggest above, possibly
on an IP port other than 80.

							Bill
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