I have documentation that states the following:

In addition to the C++ library, there are several
ways to connect your application to the library:
– Via SWIG (Simplified Wrapper and
Interface Generator, www.swig.org) you
can use KNI from several scripting and
programming languages on different
operating systems. Currently Python is the
only supported language (tested on
Windows and Linux).
– On the Windows platform, there is an ActiveX control, which can be used from different programming languages like C++, VB and Delphi.

My question is, what does this ActiveX control look like? What is the file extension? I'm in the folder with the source code, I just don't know what the control looks like. I'm not used to COM and this is important because I need to interface to Labview. Any ideas?

 

is this for school?

 

The extension is .OCX
Try googling and see if you can find what you're looking for?

 

Not exactly. My thesis involves a robotic arm, but it came with really lame documentation. The source files won't build and they statically coded all the library paths.

Thanks for the extension. I'm not really sure what you mean by googling it? I have documentation and source files. Is the OCX the only activex extension?

 

OCX is the only ActiveX extension and it is usually used for web deployment of objects.

 

Yeah,
The documentation was actually specifying a .NET .dll not an ActiveX control. Thanks anyway guys.

 

No problem man, are you going to use C# or VB?

 

Neither. The designers of the robotic arm had written a bunch of low and high level c-code. We only had access to header files (.h) and the static libraries for the low level code. That prevented me from writing control algorithms because I didn't know the types of encoders, timers, motors, etc. that were being used nor did I have access to the control .c files. They did, however, provide a VS VCproject that encompassed all of the needed functions. But even then there were screw ups. For some dependencies they hard-coded file paths and I had to step through and change a good portion of them (30+).

LABVIEW is our DAQ and processing software. But since its a real-time programming language it would not run off of static libraries. So I had to get dynamic libraries out of the static code. I'm not familiar with COM programming or anything remotely related so I had a steep learning curve for .dll's. I also had to get really familiar with VS2005 - compiler AND linker options. Still, no matter what I did I could not generate the proper .dll files. But then, one line in the documentation stated something about a .NET wrapper. I imported it, used the .NET pallete in Labview and BAM I had access to some high level functions.

All I needed was high level functions (calibrate(), moveArm(), etc.) so I'm very happy with the end result. Now the next step is figuring out how to get MATLAB code to run inside LABVIEW for my filters and fuzzy logic toolbox.