What's the difference
between WinWedge Standard Edition and WinWedge Professional Edition?
WinWedge Standard Edition
The Standard Edition is the perfect tool for interfacing simple devices
like 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 Edition is designed as a simple serial device program
for interfacing most typical RS232 (serial) devices to a PC. The Standard
Edition of WinWedge 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 Edition can also be completely
controlled using Dynamic Data Exchange. The DDE capabilities allow you
to do things like write simple macros in Excel that perform fully bi directional
serial I/O functions.
WinWedge Features Common to All Versions
WinWedge Professional Edition Version
4
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, TCP/IP or Disk File Data) directly into any application program
running on a stand alone PC or across any TCP/IP network - including the
Internet.
The Professional Edition of WinWedge 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 designed to do the same job 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.
Advanced Features of WinWedge Pro
Version 4.0
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