Tablet / PC interaction

[Petrus Vorster]

The company is NOT going to buy me an electronic signature pad. Exchange rate makes them pricey down here.

Although many tablets (Huawaei and so forth) with pens can capture signatures is way cheaper, i need to find a way to make my program talk to the tablet somehow. Perhaps a bluetooth exchange. I know NOTHING of Android, but yet image exchanges does happen easily between the two.
Anyone ever worked on Powerbasic bluetooth projects or another way i can get an electronic signature from someone?

Or is it better to try and find a working signature pad secondhand somewhere to test?

[Paul Squires]

Sorry Peter, I can't help you in this area. I have no experience at all with Bluetooth.

[Petrus Vorster]

I have never looked at what happens when bluetooth pairs a device.
I will let windows and android do the pairing, i am just curious whether it creates some temporary serial port and perhaps one can just pass the image file along that lines.
Lets go along that lines then:
How can I determine which serial/communications ports are there on a PC on the fly? (And see if they change)

This is just out of pure curiosity, I can already hear the head-scratch noises of the team upstairs not understanding the importance of real-time info and the benefits of electronic signatures.

If someone has an idea, please post, otherwise i will go scavenge the It guy's back stock rooms for a lost signature pad if they ever bought one in history... 

[David Kenny]

Might be quite involved.  You will need to write an android app that captures the signature, (or interfaces with an app that does I suppose). Only your app will understand how to talk to your program on the PC. The serial transfer is pretty straight forward though.  I have a FF program that maintains a SQLIte DB and transmits it, via WiFi, to an app I wrote for my Android phone.  My phone app then communicates with some custom hardware, via BlueTooth, in the field.

You can should be able to communicate Tablet to PC using either BlueTooth or WiFi.