Integrating ARC Windows With C Or Visual Basic Routines

We are looking to find out if the EZ-Robot platform can be used to read and act on data streams from a laboratory grade light meter and a LIDAR. Basically, we expect a string of data from the light meter that would have to be parsed and acted upon.

I envision that we would need to write a routine in C or Visual basic that would poll the meter and receive the string, parse and communicate that information. I have not done this before in ARC. Can I run ARC with specific "canned" modules running while also running a C or VB routine that would do a function that is too advanced for scripting?

Does anyone have some examples of code we could review where an external program is called and run from EZ-B?