ASCII A (41H) (read Port B), followed by a ‘don’t care’ character will perform a port read function. If you send this character sequence to the card it will perform a read of the current status of the 8 bit port (even if channels are set as outputs - therefore your software does not need to ‘remember’ what you previously sent to the card). When you perform a port read function you will also need to immediately follow the command by a serial port read in order to read the characters that are transmitted back from the card to your PC.

This suggests that you can indeed poll the board. I haven’t been able to find any examples of how this is achieved in the Unix shell.

I found a similar question, but sadly no answer, here:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-networking-3/reading-data-from-a-serial-port-262496/

Chris

I haven’t tried polling my board on port A but if SB can do it I would expect it to work via Terminal too. My Mac has been running iDefrag for the last 6 hours and hasn’t finished yet but when it does I’ll give this a try myself and post another comment here within 24hrs.

Chris

Your website was quite interesting.

By the way, i am also a programmer. I use vb6.

I wanted to discuss some points with u.

———————–

Point 1 - waterbuoy vs corkball. What is ur opinion about a Table Tennis Ball.

A cork will get soggy and take its own time to dry.

Maybe it’s me. I have read the manual carefully and spent many hours using the Laz-IE Trader software and frankly NO, I don’t think it’s worth you spending £85 just to get those tissue prices. I’d be very happy if someone can convince me I’m wrong on this but that’s my personal view. Better to learn how the markets behave and develop a ’sixth sense’ for which way a market will move, and you can do that just as well with Bet-IE.

Personally I’m now studying one or two specific types of trade which can be automated using the Betfair API without any software like Bet-IE or Laz-IE Trader. Apart from saving time it also takes the emotions of fear and greed out of the equation because my home-brew program trades on its own whenever the conditions are right. It always stakes exactly the right amount, and can trade much faster than I can do it with a mouse. I’ll post more about this when I have more to report but initial results are very encouraging.

Chris

I had searched long and hard for an article on this product which wasn’t a simple advertising “puff” or affiliate link so first of all thank you for your honest appraisal.

I actually have a copy of Bet IE but I feel that it offers TOO much choice ie a jack of all trades software with the consequence that the trading function, which is what I want to get into, appears inferior to the Laz IE trader interface, due to the fact that it doesn’t offer the Bet/Lay indicators to the left hand side of the prices. I may be fooling myself though that this is an added benefit. As we seek the “holy grail” of softwares (which don’t of course exist) we nonetheless need to be reassured that the next purchase isn’t going to be a waste of money but wil enable us to do what it says on the tin - a basic function of any software.

By the way, I notice that all the videos for all the exchange softwares pick an absolute beaut of a case study in order to illustrate the power of the beast! I guess these need to be balanced up by user videos which could redress the balance. Still, you can’t knock people for being positive about their product. My trade is PR so I can talk!

Anyhow, you say in one of your replies that these Bet/Layindicators are not all that useful anyway (or have I read this wrong?) and getting a feel for the markets is more valuable. Sorry for rambling but my question is: do you think that this feature is worth paying out the extra £85 for?

Keith