interfacing project

[Timothy Wilson <wilson@chem.umn.edu>]

Greetings *,

One of my next projects at school will be to acquire some equipment to
use our computers to collect and analyze data from experiments. The
premier supplier of that type of thing is a company in Portland called
Vernier (http://www.vernier.com). They are a great company that sells a
huge number of probes (more info at http://www.vernier.com/probes/) that
can be connected to computers through several different interfaces.
Specifically, you can interface through a serial port, game port, or an
ISA card. Basically, the interfaces provide several channels of data
acquisition that can operate simultaneously and log the data to disk.

Although Vernier's hardware support is quite remarkable (they still
support Apple ][ because they know that many schools are still using
them). Their software is available for DOS, Win9x, Mac, and (partially)
Apple ][. No Linux...yet. I've asked them about a port from time to
time, but they haven't committed to anything. They do provide
documentation for their hardware, but unfortunately no source code is
available.

I'd like to write some software to control their serial interface box
(http://www.vernier.com/mbl/uli.html). I'm trying to learn Python and
would like to use it for this project. What I don't know is what I've
gotten myself into. So my question is:

What will be required for this project?
Do I need to learn C so I can write a device driver?

Does anyone have any experience in a project like this? Incidentally,
this would be a great open source project. These Vernier products can be
found in high school science departments all around the country.
Teachers love them, and not being able to run them from Linux would give
some a good reason not to learn or use Linux.

-Tim

-- 
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