Control gates from the iSeries

I have equipment that works with IP. I give it an IP number, i.e. 10.0.0.4. I can ping it from iSeries and it has four gates for open/close operation. How can I control gates from the iSeries? I have an example that I wrote on Visual Basic, but I couldn't solve problem.

It depends on what the Visual Basic program is doing. If the piece equipment you are talking to is capable of communicating through sockets, then the iSeries can directly control your piece of equipment. My guess is that is not the case with your Visual Basic program example. Many times these types of equipment are controlled by a program on a PC that talks to a serial port on the piece of equipment. With these types of equipment, there are generally several different ways to communicate with them so just because you have an example in Visual Basic doesn't mean that's the only way to talk to it.

If it's a more modern piece of equipment, there may be a good chance that it will support a sockets interface. If not, then you'll want to write a program on the PC that can talk to your equipment and the iSeries at the same time. If you do that, you'll most likely need to create a program in C and use the Client Access Express Toolkit that is an installable option on the Client Access Installation CD. You could also modify your Visual Basic program to talk to the iSeries too.

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