CrunchBang Linux

das88

Member

From: Berkeley, CA USA

Registered: 2010-04-05

Posts: 44

activex hardware control

Hi all,

This isn't really a crunchbang thing so feel free to ignore this post if you like. I can't find many resources anywhere else though so I thought I would see if the crunchbangers could save the day...

I've got a super irritating problem with a USB servo motor and activex controls. First of all, I can't figure out if there's any way to program activex in linux. I've been looking around online for a few hours now and all I've come up with is that there's an ActiveQt extension to Qt and that I might be able to write a Qt script to control the motor.

The motor comes with a set of activex controls, one of which is a configuration utility that's supposed to automatically pick up the controller when you plug it in. Here's a link to the software if anyone is interested:
http://www.thorlabs.us/software_pages/V … m?Code=APT
I'd be happy to post some of the actual .ocx files somewhere if that would help but I'm not sure where I would do that.

I'm having all kinds of trouble getting their configuration utility to recognize the usb device. In both windows and linux (I installed the software via wine), the computer recognizes the device driver and will initialize the device but the configuration utility doesn't see it. I used winetricks to install the .NET framework in wine; a possible problem is that I accidentally interrupted the installation of .NET version 2.0 and so I installed version 3 instead. When it was installing version 3 there was some message about version 2 already being installed though, and the installer may have skipped some files that it thought were already there (but may not have been?). I would try reinstalling .NET but I can't figure out how to uninstall it. The really frustrating part is that the whole set up worked right off the bat on somebody else's windows box that I tried the software on (after it failed to work with the windows system in my office) but after uninstalling and reinstalling the controller software, that system is behaving just like I described.

If I could get access to the activex control I'm pretty sure it would be easy to write my own control script - the hardware came with a manual that has all of the functions you can call from the activex object. I'd prefer to do this from linux first and deal with the windows problems later so if anyone has used activex in linux (or knows if it's possible) I would greatly appreciate some advice.

Thanks!
Devin

PS
I'm in #! 9.04.01

Last edited by das88 (2010-04-08 02:04:29)