A large number of devices communicate with the PC using either the serial (RS232 / 422/ 485) port, or through Ethernet. Internally, the communications is almost identical except one is over serial and the other over Ethernet. Rather than making separate drivers for every device, each including its own serial or Ethernet communications, DAQFactory allows you to create your own devices by combining the communications port, whether serial or Ethernet with a protocol. The protocol is the language that the device talks, while the port is the media that carries that communications. You can think of it like telephone communications. You can talk to someone over a landline phone or a cell phone. In both cases you are talking the same language (the protocol), but you are using a different technology (the port). To communicate with someone you must choose which language to speak and which method to contact the person with whom you'd like to speak. When communicating with an external device from your PC you do the same thing. You must choose whether to communicate over the serial port or Ethernet, and which protocol to use. Fortunately, DAQFactory makes all this very easy.
Note: While USB is technically just another technology for carrying serialized data, it is not handled the same way as normal serial port and Ethernet communications. USB has a number of extra layers that make it more difficult and thus the reason all USB devices include some sort of library for communications. If you are looking to communicate with a USB device, other than a serial to USB converter, that we do not have a driver for, you might want to consider using the User Device and external DLL features of DAQFactory to create your own device, or contact us and we can create a driver for you.
