Hi, all.

I have a problem with Visual Studio 2005 that I hope someone can help me with.

I have a Passat 2006 which I, of course, have installed my Empeg in. It also has a display in the dashboard where radio info and such shows up, and it's controlled with CAN messages. I'd like to get the info from the Empeg up there and since I haven't found much info on the Internet about addresses and protocols for doing that, I figured I would try to reverse-engineer the info from the radio. The problem is that the radio gives out some information and then expects some answers before it gives out more info. So I made a small program that would listen to the radio (the CAN messages, that is... :-) ) and answer it so that I could get some more info out of it and eventually, hopefully, be able to get the info to the display.

So, to my problem... I have managed to listen to the messages from the radio and print them out in a textbox, but I haven't been able to get timers to trigger. Can anyone help me with that? I have enclosed the source, but I have to warn you: I'm not a programmer...! So it's probably a lot of bad code and bad programming there. There's also left-over code from when I started to make it in VB6.

TIA,
Stig

I'm finding it hard to follow the code, I more used to C# nowadays, but I think your timers are just never getting enabled.

The timers only ever seem to get enabled in Check, which only gets called by OnDataReceived, which would only get called if DataReceived was called, which will only get called if you successfully receive some data.

If I put this in the cmdConnect_Click code:

tmrOut439.Enabled = True

Then the timer fires successfully.

Thanks, Mark. That worked.

And I found the problem with the error messages. They're not from the build process, but from when the data coming in isn't a full string, so it fails when I try to chop it up, and the Immidiate window isn't clearing for each time I run the program...

Now, for the timers, I put in a 'Console.write' line in the check routine, writing the interval and whether Enabled is true or false, and they're getting set. Could the problem be that since the Check routine is called from the 'data-received-from-serialport' routine, which is running in a different thread and the timers should be running in the GUI thread, be why they aren't firing?

Stig

I haven't used VB.NET much, but are the timer handlers actually linked to the timer object? Occasionally often in .NET projects I find the handlers get deleted or unlinked.

Don't think it is a threading issue, that only really affects controls that have a user interface, I have used timers perfectly successfully in similar threaded cases (and the timer component doesn't have an Invoke method, which it would have if it was affected).

g_attrill: I have absolutely no idea... But it works if I enable them in a button-click routine.

Andy: Ok, thanks. I'll try to modify the code some and see if I can get it working some other way...

Stig

I managed to get the timers sort of working by setting a flag for the timers in the Check routine and then start another timer when I click the Connect button which fires every ms which in turn checks the flags and starts the other timers as needed... Now I just have to get some more data out of the radio and see if I can find out how to emulate the radio...

Stig