I am trying to make an anemometer to measure wind speed as a project for my teenage son. The question is how can I get data from a coms port into a Qbasic or VBasic program so I can use this old PC as a data logger/display? Do I need to write some kind of device driver or is there a dos command / batch file that can help? Any help or pointers for further reading would be much appreciated. Rob

In Basic for DOS (Basic, GwBasic, QBasic, QuickBasic, PowerBasic, ...) you can use IN to read hardware ports. Usually COM1 is 3F8. Under Windows you need to use a special library which allows you to access directly to the hardware.

For port interfacing info - Serial, Parallel and USB : www.lvr.com Also you could use your game port if you have one - 4 switches + 4 analog to digital inputs. Actually there was a magazine article on a similar weather project within the last 2 years in one of the electronic magazines. I don't remember which one.