Right, at the moment i am trying to build an interface that will allow a manufacturing log to take deatails of the product being produced and then seding it's deatails to an industrial printer to mark the product. However, I need to send this data in a hex form to the printer, and I only know how to send the characters in qbasic. So, I was wondering if anyone out there who is familiar with visual basic (version 6.0 with the MSComm32.ocx control) could tell me how to enter hex values into visual basic code, to send through the comport, and then how to read them back into the program to monitor the printer's progress.

Any help you could give me with this, either on accessing the com port or entering teh hex values to the code would be most apreciated

Andrew.