HouseBot

I have recently gotten back to using TheaterTek as a media player and I just discovered that it now provides a very complete 2-way IP control mechanism. I'd love to hack something together quickly using VBscript (as a "proof of concept") but I can't find anything (free) that lets me do socket communication.

As such I'm toying around with the idea of writing an actual hardware interface and device plugin. Before I do a lot of work I was wondering if anyone has written any other plugins that do IP communication similar to this. If so would you be willing to share the code? I'm certainly happy to share this plugin if/when I get it finished.

-- Dave

If you want to do it in VBScript, you could probably launch something like curl.exe using a Shell.Run() command.

I definitely want to learn more about curl - I think it could be useful for other things as well (like maybe controlling a Squeezebox). I will check into that. Thanks!

-- Dave

Curl may or may not work for you, I don't know. It's really more for making http requests and retrieving data. But depending on the TheaterTek protocol, it may be a simple solution. If curl doesn't work, there may be other stand-alone IP applications that you can spawn.

Also, doing it in C++ isn't difficult either. WinSockis supported by Win32.

Here is a free activeX winsock control that will supposedly work with VBScript. I haven't tried it yet although it's on my list as I have similar needs.

http://www.killervb.com/WinsockLib.aspx

There is also this method which supposedly gets MSwinsock working but I haven't tried it, and probably wont if the above will work for me.

http://www.piclist.com/techref/os/win/instMSwinsock.htm

A source for MSwinsock and other VB OCXs

http://www.vbcodesource.com/control.html

Terry

Thanks for the links Terry! Those look very interesting - I'll check them out tonight.

-- Dave