What's the difference between WinWedge
Standard and WinWedge Professional Edition?
The Standard Edition is the perfect
tool for interfacing simple devices such as balances, scales, bar code
scanners, pH meters, measuring instruments, calipers, gauges,
GPS receivers, etc. directly to other Windows programs running
on the same workstation as WinWedge.
WinWedge Standard is designed as a simple serial
device program for interfacing most typical RS232 (serial)
devices to a PC. It has two
modes for passing incoming serial data directly to other programs:
a "Keystroke Mode" where incoming data is passed
to other programs as Keystrokes and a "DDE Server Mode"
that passes data to other programs using Dynamic Data Exchange.
The Standard Edition has basic parsing and filtering capabilities
for dealing with either fixed length or delimited data records.
It also has Hot Keys that you can define for sending prompts
out a serial port to a device simply by pressing a hot key
on your keyboard as well as a full character translation table
for translating individual characters to either specific keystrokes
or to other characters. WinWedge Standard can also
be controlled using Dynamic Data Exchange. The
DDE capabilities allow you to do things like use simple
macros in Excel that perform fully bi directional serial I/O
functions.
WinWedge Pro is essentially a highly advanced
set of applications that all work together to get data from
practically any type of data source (RS232, RS485, TCP/IP or Disk
File Data) directly into any application program running on
a stand alone PC or across any TCP/IP network - including
Ethernet or the Internet
The Professional Edition adds a number of advanced
capabilities to the Standard Edition including a "Log
to Disk Mode" that allows you to use WinWedge Pro as
an advanced serial data logger. It also has a more advanced
data parser that allows you to parse, filter and format more
complex data from more sophisticated devices. Some of the
advanced features of the parser are the ability to work with
raw binary or hex data, the ability to apply math expressions
to individual data fields in a stream of data for the purpose
of scaling the data or converting units (i.e. convert inches
to millimeters, grams to ounces, etc.) You can also define
format expressions in WinWedge Pro that allow you to do things
like force a specific number of decimal places in numeric
values or force data to contain an exact number or sequence
of characters.
The Professional Edition also has the ability
to send or receive RS232 serial data across a TCP/IP network
using two
additional programs called TCP-Wedge
and TCP-Com. TCP-Com
is designed to expose a RS232 serial port to a TCP/IP port
on a network and TCP-Wedge is exactly the same
as WinWedge Pro except that it inputs data from a TCP/IP
port
instead of an RS232 serial port. With TCP-Com and TCP-Wedge,
you could do things like connect a RS232 serial device to
the serial port on one PC and then use TCP-Wedge to input
data from that serial device directly into a program running
on
another PC somewhere in either the same network or across
the Internet. For example, you could have a GPS receiver
or
a scale sending data into the serial port on a PC in New
Zealand and then input the data from the device across the
Internet
directly into a spreadsheet running on a PC in Canada.
In addition to the above, WinWedge Pro also
comes with a program called File-Wedge that does the same
thing as WinWedge
and TCP-Wedge except that it inputs data from a disk file.
For example, you could use File Wedge to read data from
a
disk file and then feed that data directly into a database
application as keystrokes or using DDE. You can think of
File
Wedge as a shoe horn for getting data that exists in a disk
file into some other program where you would normally have
to type the data in - without having to actually type anything.
File Wedge would do all the typing for you.
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