First, I would like to say that I just stumbled upon this site and think it is great. This is the kind of stuff I have done my entire career, and hopefully can be of some help in the future. But if I may, I have a problem that you all may find interesting.

I am a reserve and fly for a local agency. We currently have five sectors and are 'paged' for calls by an out-of-date system comprised of a receiver in the helicopter that decodes DTMF and lights one of five lights on the instrument panel. This system is going away and I have to come up with a different approach.

We do have MTC's (E911 Mobile Computers) in each helicopter that run WinNT4. The dispatch to mobile is the Motorola MTC 3600 system, which does a typical ip network to all mobiles and air units.

I want to send a command to the ip port of the MTC in the helicopter and have it captured by a service or background application written in C++ or VB6. When the correct code is captured, I will turn on a pin on the LPT1 (378) port to light the paging light on the instrument cluster. This will give us eight + possible, so future growth is covered. I have previously written all the code for the capture and pin turn-on. Does anyone have any good ideas (or previous experience) of what to send to the mobile MTC? SMTP trap, TFTP, etc? Just trying to keep it simple.

Thanks for all your time.
Paul

 

Use sockets and define a packet with 2 bytes and call it type 1. Write code that stores packets as they appear in the buffer. Write a switch function called when a packet is stored that calls a function according to packet type in the first byte. With this framework you can add any future functionality you want by creating new packet types. From long experience, that's as simple as I would get because someone is sure to want to add something once that grasp what you can do. Oh, and add all the boilerplate and error handling now rather than later.

Regards

cww