Talk to an ASCII Terminal

[Nik Martin]

I am writing a VB.Net app that must send and receive data to some hardware
that acts basically like and ASCII terminal, which is a BAD thing. I'm
using the .Net NetworkStream class of the sockets namespace to send and
receive data with Byte arrays. Here's the problem: I need to treat the data
I receive like actual byte data, but the terminal sends it as an ascii
stream. For example, if the terminal sends FFFFFF0000000, I get
70,70,70,70,70,70,0,0,0,0,0,0, which is the ASCII codes for the TEXT
"FFFFFF0000000" What the data actually is is a bit array of switch states,
like 1111111111111111111111111100000000000000, etc. How on earth can I
convert the text "F" (Chr(70)) into Byte 16 so I can then use the BitArray
class to look at the individual bits?

Thanks in advance for any help,

Nik Martin