One of the more interesting lines of programming work I have had is to develop front-end software for robotics servo motor and camera systems for several manufacturing clients. Many of these applications used serial port communications to send and receive commands from the equipment. Much of the programming could be adapted to today's USB ports for connecting to newer devices.

The picture below shows a prototype hardware and software system that I developed several years ago that monitored sensors outside of a computer, which in turn controlled a demo e-learning course.

It demonstrated the ability to create e-learning capable of responding to an external stimulus, in this example, several electrical switches outside of the computer.

The program simultaneously monitored 3 independent channels, each of which had 256 possible binary input codes (8 bits per channel). More independent channels would have been readily possible, if more interface cards were added to the host computer and the monitoring software.

Because this program was created with ToolBook Instructor, it had the ability to include a flexible range of integrated courseware development options, such as interactive training simulations and student/ worker performance testing inside and outside of the computer screen environment, for physical equipment.