communication between two computers with 2 c++ programs
I have one computer that is running a c++ program to control a robot and another computer that is running a computer vision system (also written in c++). I would like for these two programs to be able to talk to one another. The communication would not have to be complex, I would just need the robot computer to be able to tell the vision computer when a trial begins and ends (when to start and stop a data collection sequence). Do any of you have advice on how to approach this problem? Rs232 communication between the computers? Some kind of networking solution? smoke signals? Any suggestions would be welcome. thank you in advance
(edit) In case you think the statement above is vague:
I need to pass a binary (go/don't go) signal from one computer to another. Unfortunately I can't be more specific about what this will look like because (obviously) I don't know what is available. Both computers are on a network, and both computers are running windows. The goal is to syncronize data collected by the computer vision system with actions performed by the robot. The communication does need to be fast enough that it will not slow down either the robot or the computer-vision program. a "good" solution would be 1) easy to implement 2) fast. I do not know much about networking and I am looking for a place to start looking.
thank you again for your assistance
Answer
You might use a simple UDP protocol - the advantage being that if you understand the concepts of simple packet protocols on RS232 you'll find it easy to transfer that knowledge to sending the packets via UDP.
If you want a reliable (as in, other parts of the system will worry about errors and retries) stream of bytes between the two PCs, then TCP/IP is not much more complicated to use than UDP.
Both UDP and TCP are accessed through 'sockets'. I'm afraid you'll find that from C++ there is rather a lot of tedious boilerplate to getting that working, but there are lots and lots of examples around.