FUzE ActiveX Control
Platform: Windows 95/98/NT
Latest News
05/02/2000 – I whipped this together very quickly based upon the work I did with FireworX-10. Interestingly, though, my FireworX-10 program does not use this control. In its next release it certainly will. This is the first ActiveX control I have ever written so it may have some things wrong or I may have left something out. Please feel free to contact me should you have a question, comment, problem, etc.
Features
Firecracker Utilization Enabler (FUzE) is a simple control you can include in your Visual Basic project (or other programming tool that can use OCX controls) to send commands to the Firecracker. It has three methods that will interest you:
Initialize(port)
port – required. An integer representing the serial port that the Firecracker is on. For example, pass a ‘1’ for COM1. Returns TRUE if port initialize was successful.
Initialize opens the path for communication with the Firecracker.
Terminate()
Terminate closes the COM port used for communication with the Firecracker.
SendCommand(house_code, unit, action)
house_code – A string with the letter of the house code. Valid values are "A" through "P"
unit – An integer with the unit number. Valid values are 1 through 16.
action – A string that contains the action to perform. Valid values are "ON", "OFF", "DIM" and "BRIGHT"
SendCommand sends the specified command to the specified unit.
Example
A very simple program that applies these concepts is:
‘Open communications with Firecracker on COM1
If Not(FuseControl1.Initialize(1)) Then
MsgBox "Communications Failed"
Exit Sub
End If
‘Turn J1 ON
Call FuseControl1.SendCommand("ON", "J", 1)
Release History
1.0.0 (05/02/2000)
Initial release
Download
Download version 1.0.0: fuze.zip (~1.5 Mbytes)
Source Code
The source code is in the downloadable file
(~8 Kbytes) in the form of a VB project. I wrote it using VB5. Three files are included which I figure is all that is necessary to rebuild the thing from scratch.