I have just got a couple of LED scrolling displays for my shop to display current offers ect.They are connected to my network via ethernet and I have given them a seperate IP address so that the supplied software can program them independently. The company I got them from said they can also be programmed via Jetfile II protocol (which looks like ascii to me). I then had the idea to send data from filemaker fields in to to the displays. I am not sure if a plugin exists to send ascii via ethernet and I would want the plugin to run on Server 9 via a scheduled script.

any info would be of help

Don't know if they run on server but here are a couple of (remote) possibilities:

http://www.troi.com/software/serialplugin.html (old)

http://www.24usoftware.com/Phidgets (new, mentions LED displays on product page)

Edit: How is the "supplied software" communicating with the device over IP? It almost seems like there could/should be a Web interface to the device, in which case you could use FMP to communicate with the device in various ways (XML/XSLT, Web Viewer, PHP).

Thanks for the reply. the led displays have usb, serial and ethernet connections. As the ip address was the same on both displays , I first had to connect each display in turn via serial , and change the ip address so that they were both in range of my network. In the software you can choose how the displays are connected.

I shall have a look at those plugins