What is a way for a web browser to communicate with a hardware device? [closed]

Question

I have a data acquisition hardware device attached to a PC via USB that I'd like to send some information and settings, acquire some data, and then retrieve the acquired data on the client and send it to the server. The plan is to use a web portal to communicate with the device attached to the client PC. I was planning on writing a DLL to talk to the device. My environment on the client is Windows using Internet Explorer as the browser. The server side is Windows or Linux. What is the best way to communicate from a web browser client to a client-side device?

Clarification: The first goal is to allow the client PC to send acquisition settings to the device. The settings may be manually entered at the client or may come from the server. The second goal is to get the acquired data to the server's database. I don't need to display the acquired data at the client.

The hardware device has a CPU but very limited memory. The protocol to communicate with the device is undetermined, but I may access the device like a USB drive.

Answer 1

You could use a Java applet and communicate with the device via serial port.