Make Excel read COM ports?

Factual Questions
1

I have seen a few PC / application questions here on the SDMB, so, since we have a bit of a stumper here at work, I thought I give you folks a shot at it.

We have an analytical test we run that measures the boiling point rise in ‘black liquor’ (BL is a byproduct of the wood pulping process in papermaking). The apparatus consists of a scale and an RTD connected to the COM1 and COM2 ports of a PC and a variable heating mantle. The current method uses a program written in BASIC that polls the COM ports every 60 seconds an writes the weight and temperature of the solution to an ASCII file. When the test is complete (operator determines this) the program is stopped and the ASCII file is cut and pasted into Excel where the BPR (boiling point rise) curve is plotted and the crystallization points are calculated by evaluating delta-slope.

The issue is that we would like to make the whole thing ‘happen’ on-the-fly in Excel. To do this we need to make Excel poll the COM ports and after this we can have Excel plotting the curve and updating it’s determination of the crytallization points in ‘real time.’ This has numerous benefits.

Does anyone know how to make Excel poll the COM ports easily. We have tried a few ‘wedge’-type applications that fake Excel into thinking the COM port data is coming from the keyboard, but that didn’t fly. What other options are there? I am thinking some VB or VBA code might do it, but know nothing much about either.

2

There are several what look like ActiveX controls that seem to do exactly what you need. I plugged “reading com port from excel” into google and at least 2 promising hits.

You could probably roll your own, by writing either an activeX control, or by building some sort of proxy - have your VB application write to an object that Excel can read from. But I’d look at buying.

I don’t know of a way to make Excel read a com port directly, but I am not an Excel expert.