Using an unmanaged external DLL

I'm moving outside my fairly limited .Net experience here so this may
be a question with a simple, even obvious, answer but if someone would
be kind enough to indulge me...

I want to use a 3rd party DLL to get some data from a set of sensors -
the DLL is effectively an API to the sensor circuitry via a serial
port.

I've got a simple prototype program working so I know that I can
access and use the DLL OK (via ComInterop), but what I'm not clear
about is where the target DLL should be located and how to deploy it.

I'm presuming that this is an unmanaged DLL - if I browse to it from
within the project and try to 'Add Reference' I get an error saying
effectively that it's not recognised as a COM object, which puzzles me
a bit since it's obviously accessible OK to my sample program. But
anyhow, I'm guessing that all I do is to manually place the DLL in an
appropriate folder - perhaps /bin/debug (during development) and /bin/
release (for the final version)?

And then for deployment presumably I manually add the DLL to the
deployment package and allow it to be installed to the main
executables folder of the installed program?

Any comments/clarification much appreciated.

.

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