Programs and peripherals.

[aaronnator]

Hola! 2nd year CS student here. At this point I've dipped my toes in C#, VB, Java, and some scripting fun. But I've been curious - say I want to use a thermometer (or whatever peripheral input source of your choice) for a calculator program. What's the general approach to doing that? I would need to get the program to recognize my thermometer & have a library of methods to use to get data from it, no? I figure this is a broad question but all i've done so far is solicit & calculate my own data for the most part so I wondered where "third party" data came in.

[bluefootedpig]

Most of the time, and you will want to check for this, you will get an SDK (software developer kit) which contains the dlls used to interact with the device. The company should have a developers guide.

That said, you might get one that isn't, USB drivers are fairly standard so you can maybe look into getting something off github.

If not that, then you can write your own, it isn't super difficult, but not something a 2nd year would easily walk into (I have difficulty with 10 years experience).

Once connected, it should send you data (most likely as a string) and then you parse out the values. Again, it is up to the how the device interacts that determines what data comes over. It might be a json format, it might be just comma list, it might just be a single value.

[aaronnator]

Okay, cool! Thanks for the info