Thanks very much. I really appreciate the offer, and may very well take you up on this at some point. You mention a background in industrial controls. What types of things have you been/are you involved in?
I have written programs to control hardware through the serial port- I have written and aircraft sensor reader/graphical display, an industrial weight scale interface, software to interface to a 'tube bender' (i can't recal the real name of the machine- but it bent tubing to specs downloaded) etc...
All rs-232 programs are the same- just tell me the expected data stream (inputs and outputs) and I can take it from there- I am familiar with break-out boxes and protocol analyzers for debugging (sometimes it is NOT my code that is the problems - and this is the way to show it... LOL )