Published July 2001

FINE TUNING AN EMBEDDED IDEA

Part 1: The Land of BL2000
by Fred Eady

Start • Z-World’s BL2000 • C Me… • Lock and Load • Acquire the Voltage Data • Transport and Display the Voltage Data • Just the Beginning • Sources and PDF

LOCK AND LOAD

Now that all of the Dynamic C Premier core bits are in place, it’s time to tell you why I brought you this particular way. I have a mission.

A need has arisen to obtain voltage readings from a set of sensors. The problem is that the sensors aren’t local to the Microsoft Windows 2000 server that’s supposed to turn the readings into a pretty web page for the engineers and managers at the home office. If a problem pops up, this data also has to be available to the mobile engineers who may be in the field or in a hotel room praying to the Internet gods, their laptops. The big Win2k server’s presence in this scenario is obvious, and now that you know why you’re here, the presence of the Z-World BL2000 at the opposite end of the connection becomes a no-brainer. In case you just relaxed, there’s something else you have to do with the voltage data. Put it in an Excel spreadsheet.

There are lots of companies and "Internet experts" out there that can sell you a multi-thousand dollar package to do the Excel data entry trick. They brag about being able to acquire the data using a PC and routing the data over the Internet using TCP/IP and stuffing it into one of Bill’s Excel spreadsheet cells. I don’t know where you work, but if I told my client or boss I could use the Z-World BL2000 to perform this task without spending more that a couple hundred dollars plus my time instead of a couple thousand dollars plus my time, which one do you think they’d choose? Now that we’re all in the same boat, let’s float.

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