Lazarus and FreePascal

[P E Schoen]

Recently I discovered FreePascal and the Lazarus IDE. I was rather skeptical
about how useful it might be as a replacement for Borland Delphi (D4Pro)
which I have been using for over 15 years for Windows GUI apps. So yesterday
I decided to download them and install on my new Toshiba Satellite Win10
laptop.

I was pleasantly surprised, and I was able to convert, build and run some
simple Delphi projects. But unfortunately I was unable to install the
ComDrv32 serial port component I recently adopted for my legacy BTSA3 and
Ortmaster projects, or the SerialNG component I had been using since about
2004. The SerialNG would not work on Win10.

So I joined the Lazarus discussion forum, and found that someone had
provided an open source TLazSerial component. I was able to install the
TLazSerial component and build the demo GPS Simulator. I have a USB serial
port designed in a custom data acquisition board, and when a Ctrl-T
character is sent, it returns a stream of 240 unique character pairs, at
4800 characters per second, on a 57.6 kB connection. I was able to
accomplish this with a TEST button and an OnClick handler.

http://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php/topic,20481.120.html

Here is the download page:
http://www.freepascal.org/download.var

Paul

[P E Schoen]

Here is the download page for Lazarus:
http://www.lazarus-ide.org/

Paul

[Hans-Peter Diettrich]

Post by P E Schoen
I have a USB
serial port designed in a custom data acquisition board, and when a
Ctrl-T character is sent, it returns a stream of 240 unique character
pairs, at 4800 characters per second, on a 57.6 kB connection. I was
able to accomplish this with a TEST button and an OnClick handler.

Fine :-)

Does your entire project now run, based on Lazarus?

DoDi

[P E Schoen]

Post by Hans-Peter Diettrich

I have a USB serial port designed in a custom data acquisition board,
and when a Ctrl-T character is sent, it returns a stream of 240 unique
character pairs, at 4800 characters per second, on a 57.6 kB connection.
I was able to accomplish this with a TEST button and an OnClick handler.

Fine :-)
Does your entire project now run, based on Lazarus?

I have not tried that yet, and I probably won't, unless it becomes
necessary. The BTSA and Ortmaster projects are now mature and stable, and
won't need more than a few maintenance tweaks like the change of serial port
component. The Ortmaster project is particularly complex due to database
portions using BDE and QuickReports.

What I probably should do is a rewrite pretty much from the ground up. Much
of the code is questionable and inefficient due to my learning Delphi as I
built and enhanced the project. The BTSA project may be simple enough to
rewrite, and I need to make better use of object based programming
practices. I do have some of the code in separate units, but some units use
conditional compiles based on ORT or BTSA $defines.

I plan to build a new project that will read a huge CSV text file (about 1.8
GB), and split it into more manageable file sizes that can be converted to
spreadsheet format with Open Office. It has a maximum of 1048576 lines with
an ODS file of 11.2 MB. This is a database of all songs in the ASCAP
database. It was supplied in a 288 MB zipfile.

Somehow I got interested in copyright issues and royalties and licenses for
performing or playing copyrighted music in public or private venues. I think
licenses and royalties mostly apply to professional musicians and DJs and
for recording and selling music. I have recorded myself and others playing
and singing music and have made YouTube videos of that. It's a tricky
subject!

Paul

[Marco van de Voort]

Post by P E Schoen
I plan to build a new project that will read a huge CSV text file (about 1.8
GB), and split it into more manageable file sizes that can be converted to
spreadsheet format with Open Office. It has a maximum of 1048576 lines with
an ODS file of 11.2 MB. This is a database of all songs in the ASCAP
database. It was supplied in a 288 MB zipfile.

Using fpspreadsheet (in fpc/lazarus) you can churn out office files
directly, without having an office installed. (and at least as important,
decoupling your applications from Office version)

[Marco van de Voort]

Post by P E Schoen
Recently I discovered FreePascal and the Lazarus IDE. I was rather skeptical
about how useful it might be as a replacement for Borland Delphi (D4Pro)
which I have been using for over 15 years for Windows GUI apps. So yesterday
I decided to download them and install on my new Toshiba Satellite Win10
laptop.
I was pleasantly surprised, and I was able to convert, build and run some
simple Delphi projects. But unfortunately I was unable to install the
ComDrv32 serial port component I recently adopted for my legacy BTSA3 and
Ortmaster projects, or the SerialNG component I had been using since about
2004. The SerialNG would not work on Win10.

What actually went wrong with comdrv32 ?

[P E Schoen]

Post by Marco van de Voort
What actually went wrong with comdrv32 ?

I don't remember all the problems, but the compilation ran into problems
with undefined references in some of the source files in the package. It may
have had something to do with misunderstanding how packages and components
work, and how to convert from Delphi to Lazarus. I may try again, but the
TLazSerial component seems to work well enough.

Paul