Nuts and Volts - February 2018

modules.
 Public App As Application
 Public;NavControl;As;NavigationController
 Private Page1 As Page
 Private astream As AsyncStreams
 Private ser As B4RSerializator
 Private socket As Socket
 Public;connected;As;Boolean
 Private;btnConnect;As;Button
 Private btnS0 As Button
 Private btnS1 As Button
 Private;btnS2;As;Button
 Private;imgvLedD0;As;ImageView
 Private;imgvLedD1;As;ImageView
 Private;imgvLedD2;As;ImageView
 Private;txfIP;As;TextField
 Private lblIP As Label
 Private lblStatus As Label
 Dim;data();As;Object
End;Sub

If you’re thinking this looks a bunch like the B4R code, you’re right. The cool thing about B4R and B4I is that if you learn to code in one, you can code in the other. As you can see in our Process Globals assignments, we are coding with AsyncStreams and B4RSerializator on the iPhone end too.

Before we touch the Connect button, we must enter the IP address of the D1 Mini server. If you take a peek back at the B4R code, the Mini’s IP address is displayed in n FIGURE 1. These LED images were very easy to create. There are plenty of tutorials on the Internet that describe in detail how to draw these types of graphic images. n SCREENSHOT 2. The B4R development platform automatically programs the WEMOS D1 Mini upon successful compilation of the target source code. In this case, we have instructed the Mini to cough up its server IP address in the log area of B4R.

If you think about that, it is a must. We have to have an “other end” to our data pipe (AsyncStreams), and we must be able to encode and decode on both ends of the link with B4RSerializator.

touched. The Connect button is actually the blue RF graphic to the right of the IP address text box.

The NavigationController is iPhone related and you can get the gist of what it does by its name. Since the D1 Mini is a Wi-Fi device and Wi-Fi flows over TCP/IP, sockets are involved. A socket is no more than an IP address that is associated with a port address.

The trio of buttons (S0, S1, and S2) is shadowed by a trio of associated blue LED indicators called imgvLedDx. The LED indicators are image views that will contain either the ON or OFF version of the blue LED. The blue LED graphics you see in Figure 1 were created using Photoshop.

The IP address textfield is used to input the address of the WEMOS D1 Mini server. Once the IP address is entered, the Connect button is used to kick off the code for the connection to the server. The status label will shift its graphic payload between a broken red chain and green linked chain, depending on the status of the connection to the Mini server. The data object is an array that is used in the B4RSerializator encoding and decoding processes.

We are ready to move into making things happen.

Let’s initialize the B4RSerializator and show our Visual Designer artwork: There are tutorials on the Internet that describe how to create the LED images. Each of these images will toggle between ON and OFF when the associated

Private Sub Application_Start (Nav As
NavigationController)
 ser.Initialize
 NavControl;=;Nav
 Page1.Initialize(“Page1”)
 Page1.RootPanel.LoadLayout(“nvRemoteControl”)
 NavControl.ShowPage(Page1)
End;Sub