SLCom: Overview

SLCom is a proprietary protocol. It is no longer supported on any SPLat board that supports the industry standard ModBus.

The SLCom control is an ActiveX control designed to make it easy for you to write applications that take advantage of the SPLatLink communications protocol in SPLat Boards. It features:

• Easy access to Data Memory, Inputs and Outputs, Analog I/O and timers (regular timers and the Pause timer), with no need to understand the details of the actual communications mechanisms involved.
• Open-ended message send and receive capabilities, which let you communicate with a SPLat board at a lower level but without having to worry about message overhead chores like checksums etc.
• Simplification of the mechanics of establishing connection with the SPLat board via the COM port, including an AutoSearch feature that will automatically scan all available COM ports to find a board.

SLCom has been used extensively with Visual Basic 6. It has also been used in a demonstration project with LabVIEW.

SLCom is the new name for what was originally called LDComm or LDComms. It was renamed 11/11/03 in line with the renaming of the communications protocol from LiveData to SPLatLink. The renaming was triggered by a need to resolve versioning problems.

If you have any of our applications that use the older LDComms.ocx you are strongly urged to update them to the newer SLCom.ocx. The best way to do this to uninstall the application(s) and delete LDComms.ocx out of windows\system or windows\system32, then download and install the new installation files. If you have built your own applications around LDComms.ocx, install the newer SLCom.ocx and recompile your application around it (this will require a once-off global search and replace)