How to Use VBA to Communicate with IoT Devices Over Serial Port in Excel?
I'm working through a tutorial and I'm deploying to production and Working on a project where I need to communicate with IoT devices via a serial port using Excel VBA... The goal is to read sensor data from a device connected to a Raspberry Pi and display it in a user-friendly format on an Excel sheet. I've set up the serial connection using the MSComm control but ran into some challenges when trying to read data continuously. Here’s a snippet of the code I currently have: ```vba Dim WithEvents SerialPort As MSComm Sub InitializeSerialPort() Set SerialPort = New MSComm With SerialPort .CommPort = 1 ' Adjust based on your port .Settings = "9600,N,8,1" .InputLen = 0 .RThreshold = 1 .PortOpen = True End With End Sub Private Sub SerialPort_OnComm() Select Case SerialPort.CommEvent Case comEvReceive Dim receivedData As String receivedData = SerialPort.Input ProcessData receivedData End Select End Sub Sub ProcessData(data As String) ' Parse and display the data in Excel Dim parsedValue As Variant parsedValue = Split(data, ",") ' Assuming CSV format ' Displaying the first value in cell A1 ThisWorkbook.Sheets(1).Range("A1").Value = parsedValue(0) End Sub ``` Despite having established the connection and being able to receive data, I’ve noticed that data is not being captured continuously or consistently. Sometimes I miss data bursts if the processing takes too long, or I encounter issues if the device sends data too rapidly. I’ve also considered adding some form of buffer management but am unsure how to implement that efficiently. Have you faced similar challenges when working with VBA for IoT? Any insights into optimizing this data reception process would be greatly appreciated. I'm particularly interested in best practices concerning serial communication in Excel. Additionally, are there any limitations I should be aware of when using the MSComm control in terms of performance and data throughput? For context: I'm using Vba on Debian. Any feedback is welcome! For context: I'm using Vba on Windows 10. I'd really appreciate any guidance on this.