Other Help Topics :: Serial connection

Me and my friend build a haunted house for halloween every year, for the past 2 years. This year, we are doing some computer automation.
I have a collection of old 486 boards lying around my basment workshop so I am using a 486dx2 at 66mhz. What I would like to do is be able to link this computer, wich will run ouside lights, to a main machine to monitor it. I have a serial port and an ethernet port avalible.

Is there a way for me to have a program crap out a status of what lights are on? What sort of code (C++) would be used to do this?

Of course, I will be using DSL

I was sorta thinking something like telnet, but how would I get the program to crap out status? Maybe have a program write a HTML output file with a refresh code thingy in it every time it sends to the parallel port.

*Sigh*

For simplicity's sake, iv'e decided to just use Qbasic and forgo the remote monotoring.

Still, how do you log on and use a terminal through the serial port? Could you literally just dial in from a serial modem and log on, or is there a bit of software you have to run?

Bingo thanks!