R help - Jun 2004 - R as controller

Hi all,

this may be a 'stupid' question, but it would be great if it exists.
What's it about? For the control of experiments, special (and expensive)
software is often necessary. The main 'difficulty' I have is to read
data from different (measurement) devices and send them to some actuators
(reading from a serial device and the protocols). Is there a package in R for
reading and writing to a serial port, including the protocols for ADAM modules
etc? Or is there anyone having plans to program such a package? If it would
exist, R could be as a controller, which would make life much easier, at least
my life :).

tnx,
Kurt

What OS is this?  How do you access a serial port?  On most modern OSes
user processes such as R have no direct access to serial ports.  If access
is via a Unix device, binary connections will probably work.

In my limited experience that expensive software runs under a low-level
OS, MS-DOS or a real-time OS.

On Fri, 18 Jun 2004, groensels wrote:
> this may be a 'stupid' question, but it would be great if it
exists.
> What's it about? For the control of experiments, special (and
expensive)
> software is often necessary. The main 'difficulty' I have is to
read
> data from different (measurement) devices and send them to some
> actuators (reading from a serial device and the protocols). Is there a
> package in R for reading and writing to a serial port, including the
> protocols for ADAM modules etc? Or is there anyone having plans to
> program such a package? If it would exist, R could be as a controller,
> which would make life much easier, at least my life :).

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595