Serial Port in WSH (vbs)

Ever Happen to you - Hey we need a program to send AT commands to a modem through the computer's serial port and store the responses to a text file and by the way we perfer a non-compiled language that will run on any windows computer.

So then I thought I know we will use Windows Scripting Host, anybody with a windows computer can run a .vbs file. Did some research, not much documentationon using serial port in a vbs file just some stuff about the MSComm32 - but you have register it ( just seemed annoying). Came across ActiveComport - now this is great. By installing ActiveComport, serial port programing becomes downright simple. So I write out the program and install ActiveComport - bam works perfect. And then discover you have to pay to use ActiveComport, of course there is no money to do that, so back to the drawing board.

Discovered this website http://www.hardandsoftware.net/, which has the NETCommOCX which is an ActiveX control that wraps the functionality of MSComm32.ocx. By the way check out the other cool stuff on the site, there are some neat thins there. NETCommOCX works perfect, and it is a free download with no restrictions. It does need to be installed on the computer you intend on using the program on.

So FYI, here is the program written in vbs, basically it needs two text files command.txt and out.txt already in the directory of the program. Command.txt contains one AT command per line, so the script loads each one into an array, then writes each command to the serial port. The program then waits 300ms for a response and writes the response to the out.txt file and to the screen. The commands are issued in an infite loop until the progam is stopped (Ctrl-c). The time to wait shoud be changed based on the device. There are more advanced ways to control the flow of the program, instead of waiting for specified time it can poll the serial port for data and pause until it recieves data.

program code, should be pretty self-explanatory (hopefully). The program is meant to be run with cscript - c:\cscript program.vbs
---------------------------------------------------
Set objComport = CreateObject( "NETCommOCX.NETComm" )

objComport.CommPort = 1
objComport.Settings = "9600,N,8,1"
objComport.InputLen = 0
objComport.PortOpen = True

wscript.echo "Port is open and ready"

Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set objTextFile = objFSO.OpenTextFile("command.txt", 1)

i = 1

Do Until objTextFile.AtEndOfStream
Redim Preserve arrdata(i)
arrData(i) = objtextfile.ReadLine
i = i + 1
Loop

objTextFile.Close

Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set objTextFile = objFSO.OpenTextFile("out.txt", 2)

do while (1) ' wscript.stdin.atendofline
for j = 1 to (i-2)
str1 = arrdata(j)
wscript.echo str1
objComport.output = (arrdata(j)) & VBCR
wscript.sleep(300)
str = objComport.InputData
wscript.echo str
wscript.echo "------------"
objTextFile.Writeline ("command: " & arrdata(j))
objTextFile.Writeline (str)
objTextFile.WriteLine ("-------------------")
next
loop

objTextFile.close
objComport.PortOpen = False ' Close the port