Software design for hardware?

Anyone have any experience with designing software for hardware? I know C++ & C# pretty decent and designed several applications with them but I have some old hardware that I would like to use but I have no software for it. I do not have any experience with interfacing soft & hardware. My question is how hard is it to interface the two? Any good places to look for tutorials? The hardware is connected via serial connection.

Hardware/Software co-design can be pretty fun, but challenging. You'll need to learn the specifications of the hardware you are using, the programming language's libraries, and any O.S. protection that puts up roadblocks. For example, you may not be able to write directly to the hardware with straight C code in Windows XP, but instead use their APIs. I believe with serial ports you need to make a modification to get direct hardware access.

You may also need to learn the how to deal with interrupts, vector tables, etc. depending on what you're trying to do. All in all, you probably won't have too many problems as long as you're willing to read specifications and accept that you'll make mistakes due to misunderstanding (or forgetting parts of) them.

thanks for the info, the thing about this hardware was it was designed about 10 years ago for an old flight simulator that has been discontinued and is no longer supported by the manufacture in any way. I want to developed it so that I can use it with a new flight simulator and make use of this very expensive faa certified equipment; any suggestions on where to start when dealing with a situation of this type? I don’t think it will be too hard once I figure out what the heck I am doing. Is C the language fore doing something like this? is there any applications out there that can read data from a serial so I can even test to see that I am receiving data?

Oh sure, C or C++ would be great languages. You should have no problem finding easy libraries for direct hardware access and good tutorials. I would also be very surprised if you had a hard time finding a port monitoring utility, so you could see the data being passed to/from the device. However, you're friend here is Google.

You're going to have to spend a good amount of time monitoring the port to reverse engineer the HW/SW layer. You'll probably want to try to load it up with the old software, monitor the commands, and map it out. It shouldn't be too difficult, luckily, and then you can begin writing the code. It will take some time, but it sounds like a great project to learn from.

My experience is with custom hardware, assembly and C code for embedded systems - in college. So I can give pointers, but its been a while.