Hi Good day, I need help for a VB 2010 problem

[anthonyvansacabin]

Good day,

I am creating a project that monitors temperature, Ph level and salinity of water and control a mechanical feeder that automatically put food in the water. The title is water quality monitoring and control system. I am using sensors that is interfaced to a computer and I am using VB 2010 to create the software to display the data from the sensors. My problem is I want to be able to access the data and and control the feeder via internet, Is there a way where I can use Visual basic to communicate with my website monitor and control it using a webpage something like a web based application.

I hope someone here could help me please.

[Shaggy Hiker]

Yeah, you can do it. A bit more information would be necessary, but I'm curious about the application. After all, you sound like you are talking about fish farm management, or something like that, which is an interest of mine.

As for the question. If I understand you correctly, the program you are building will be on a computer where it will be reading the sensor information, then either that computer or another one will be exposing that to the web...in some fashion. Is that correct? If so, it seems like you have two parts to the project. The first part would be the interface to the data readers. That seems like it might be via serial port, or some such. It's quite a bit different from the other part of the project, though.

The other part seems like it might be ASP.NET. You'd need a webserver, or some such, to host the site (or a third party host, or something like that). I doubt that you'd want the program that is doing the monitoring and controlling to also be the webserver, so you might want to be thinking of one application that monitors/controls things on one computer, and that one communicates with the webserver.

I'd say that I'm kind of rambling, though, but that's because I have no idea what point you are at with this. Sounds like a good project, though. What's the hardware? What kinds of sensors? Do they come with some kind of interface software?

[anthonyvansacabin]

Thank you for your answer and interest. Yes the project is for a fish farm application. About the server controlling and monitoring I want the webpage to display the data from sensors and also for me to control the fish feeder or sone mechanical part from the webpage.

[Shaggy Hiker]

So, where are you with it?

The part that gathers data from the sensors and the part that controls the fish feeder should be the same, but they can be quite separate (or not) from the part that interacts with the web. It may well be the harder part, too. If you build up a program that will do that then you'd have it half done. I'd be inclined to build that up as a class library that could be referenced either by a Windows app (for testing), as well as by an ASP.NET app for the web interaction.

[anthonyvansacabin]

I am done with the interface from sensors to computer using micro-controller, serial interface and VB. My only problem now is how to connect it to a webpage where I can see the data like values and graphs from my sensor and to be able to control the mechanical fish feeder there. The controls would be simple feed now or setting the time interval for it to automatically feed the fish. You said you are inclined to build that connect to to asp.net app but I am not that good at asp just php. Also, Can you give me some reading references like ebooks or tutorial for this part.

Anthony

[Shaggy Hiker]

I'm not all that good with ASP, either. I tend to stay entirely in the Windows Forms world for most everything I do. The reason I suggested ASP is because you can stick with VB.NET. However, if you already know php, then you might as well stick with what you know. However, I know nothing about php.

It seems to me that you have two, relatively straightforward tasks. After all, the amount of information that you are getting back from the user of the web page is trivial. A couple integers or floating point values, at best. The whole issue would be showing the data, which I would think would be a bit straightforward, too, because I would expect that the interface to the devices is writing the recordings to a database, either one by one, or as a running average. Which means that the webpage display is a matter of querying the database for some segment of time and showing a graph of that data. Also probably showing the current readings in a couple labels, and having a couple input boxes for setting feed intervals. Of course, the controls for setting feed intervals could be as complicated as you feel up to. For example, entering time could be as simple as entering hours and minutes for some date, or it could be as complicated as an animated clock fact where you moved the hands. Since I'm not particularly artistic, I'd be going with the simple textboxes, but there are loads of third party time/date controls out there for the web world, so there would be lots of things to look at. Actually, there is so much artistry that goes into web pages, and I'm so non-artistic, that that is the primary reason I'm not all that much into web programming. Logic is one thing, drawing is something quite else.