non-static method cannot be referenced from a static context

Question

I would like to understand this once and for all.

With this please excuse the mass of code pasted below, but I do not want to leave out any details.

The only

Answer 1

You need to make your function static:

public static HashMap readPositions(String destFile) {
...
}

Creating an instance of GarageComm would work too, but this is bad programming practice in Java, since that object has no state.