PC Basic

More an more now, I need to interface human input to Windows and control the outside world from the PC. I have used Hyperterminal for exchanging data, and even played with Visual Basic. Using VB is like hunting mosquitos with a Howitzer.
Is there a Basic type language environment for Windows that is easier to accomplish simple prompts and control the Com ports (including USB) that is also affordable? There are some free ones out there, but I am not familiar with which is the best. All suggestions will be gratefully accepted!

Thanks,
Ron

Hi, ron

On OOOOOOld Win 98 Cds you could have found QuickBasic or GW basic ...

iF unfoundable ... give me an address to send you a copy !!!

Alain

There is VISUAL BASIC for DOS.
Serach the web for VBDOS.
VBDOS came with a tutorial that will have you up and running
in less than an hour.
It is real small. You can make a DOS boot disk with a VB Dos
application on it that does serial port I/O to your PIC and displays
pretty buttons onscreen. A harddiskless PC with a floppy diskette
drive locked inside it can be your user interface.
The syntax is QBASIC verbatum so its easy to get help ,books and
examples.
OR
You can use any programming language that can do CGI AND
do serial port I/O and then run a local web server like xitami and
write your user interfaces as CGI web pages.

Can we execute DOS programs from Win XP Home like we were able to in Win '98?

Robert
:)

EDIT: Nevermind, I found QBASIC on my old Win '98 and the DOS prompt in the START menu.

I dug out a real old project and blew the dust off it.
It put a screen up with 4 buttons and a text box on the PC
and when you pressed a button,up , down, left, right... ON THE SCREEN it would display text in the text box and send the text out the COM2 port to a PIC16F84 chip waiting with SERIN and the PIC would turn on relays for motors.

Here is the heart of the action, the subroutine that talks to the PIC:

SUB sendsom(stuff$)
displaybox.Text=stuff$
OPEN "COM2:300,N,8,1,CD0,CS0,DS0" FOR RANDOM AS #1
PRINT#1,stuff$;
CLOSE#1
END SUB

and when events happen they call subroutines that are
assigned to those events so when you make a button on the screen
, such as downbutton, it has an event associated with it called a CLICK so you get to have a subroutine called
downbutton_Click that executes when you click the downbutton
....real simple event driven programming... thank you Bill Gates
for this FIRST time ever event driven language.

SUB downbutton_Click()
sendsom("DOWN")
END SUB

Come on, using vb is not so hard... Have a look On this URL and say at least thanks to Bruce for his helpful website!

O.K., I looked around the web for an "easier" Basic than Visual. After exhaustive research (about ten minutes) I found Liberty Basic. I downloaded the beginner free version, found that it had what I needed, including comms and stand alone program features, and bought a liscense for $60. It even has a GUI layout program written in Liberty Basic to make buttons and inputting data easier. After an hour of fiddling around, I made a pop up control pad that controls an external PTZ camera with mouse clicks.
Thanks for all the help and insight.

Ron