Hi I have just started a project at Uni in which i will be developing a system to monitor a railway level crossing. I want to be able to store the information about lighting/barriers etc on a computer then send the info over a phone line to another computer. I dont really know where to start at the moment, i'm not asking for coding help or anything like that..... yet! i just want any general ideas about how it could be done? Any help that someone could give me would be very much appreciated Thanks again John

which language you are using?

If you are going to use a windows based machine, then you could use RAS and create your own components, or you could buy TurboPower's ActiveX AsyncPro (which contains all the error trapping and it has been tested and works great) Hope this helps some Chi Chi Happens "They mostly come at night...mostly"

It shouldn't be difficult and you shouldn't need to buy anything but the hardware. You just write your data collection programme at the level crossing to open the serial port and ring up the remote computer. On the other end, you have a programme waiting for the call on the receiving modem which answers when it hears the ring, authenticates then reads in the data. Of course you have to learn how to use the serial port and the modem commands but there's plenty of documentation: http://www.easysw.com/~mike/serial/serial.html http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Modem-HOWTO.html If writing the communication code is not important to your project then something like AsyncPro won't cost you much since it appears to have moved to sourceforge now.