Serial commands

The Serial Monitor has limited settings, but enough to handle most of your serial communication needs. The first setting you can alter is the baud rate. Click on the baud rate drop-down menu to select the the correct baud rate. Last, you can the the terminal to autoscroll or not by checking the box in the bottom left corner.

If you're on Windows Vista, 7, or 8, and really just have to have HyperTerminal, a little scouring of the Internet should turn up some workarounds. Better alternatives are more easily available however- we'll get to those shortly. If you're on a pre-Vista machine, and only have HyperTerminal to work with, here are some tips and tricks for using it:. When initially opening up HyperTerminal, it will present you with a "Connection Description" dialog. Enter any name you please, and, if you really want to get fancy, select your favorite icon.

Then hit "OK". On the next window, ignore the first three text boxes -- we're not working with a dial-up modem here.

Do select your COM port next to the "Connect using" box. The settings on the next box should look pretty familiar. Make sure the "Bits per second" dropdown is set to the correct baud rate. And verify that all of the other settings are correct. Hit "OK" once everything looks correct there. It doesn't look like much, but you now have an open terminal!

Type in the blank white area to send data, and anything that is received by the terminal will show up there as well. There are some limited adjustments we can make to the HyperTerminal UI. Under the "Settings" tab you'll see most of the options. If you want to see what you're typing in the terminal, you can turn on local echo.

The other settings are very specific to formatting how characters are sent or received. For most cases they should be let be. Those who have used HyperTerminal have either come to accept it for what it is, or sought out some other -- any other! It's not great for serial communication, but it does work. Let's explore some of the better alternatives! Tera Term is one of the more popular Windows terminal programs. It's been around for years, it's open source, and it's simple to use.

For Windows users, it's one of the best options out there. You can download a copy from here. Once you have Tera Term installed, open up it up, and let's poke around. You should initially be presented with a "TeraTerm: New connection" pop-up within the program.

Here, you can select which serial port you'd like to open up. Select the "Serial" radio button. Then select your port from the drop-down menu. That'll open up the port. TeraTerm defaults to setting the baud rate at bps 8-N You'll see a window pop up with a lot of familiar looking serial port settings.

Adjust what you need to and hit "OK". That's about all there is to it. The blank window with the blinking cursor is where data is both sent by typing it in and received.

It can be weird to type stuff in the window and not see it show up in the terminal. It's undoubtedly still flowing through the serial terminal to your device, but it can be difficult to type when you don't have any visual feedback for exactly what you're typing.

You can turn on local echo by going to the Setup menu and selecting Terminal. There are other settings to be made in this window as well. If you want to clear your terminal screen you can use either the "Clear buffer" or "Clear screen" commands.

Both are located under the Edit menu. Clear screen will do just that, blank out the terminal screen, but any data received will still be preserved in the buffer. Scroll up in the window to have another look at it. Clear buffer deletes the entire buffer of received data -- no more data to scroll up to. Menus are a pain! If you want to get really fast with TeraTerm, remember some of these shortcuts:.

TeraTerm is awesome for simple ASCII-only serial terminal stuff, but what if you need to send a string of binary values ranging from ? For that, we like to use RealTerm. RealTerm is designed specifically for sending binary and other difficult-to-type streams of data. RealTerm is available to download on their SourceForge page. When you open up RealTerm, you'll be presented with a blank window like below.

The top half is where you'll type data to send, and it'll also display data received. The bottom half is split into a number of tabs where we adjust all of the settings. Let's get connected! To begin, navigate to the "Port" tab.

On the "Port" dropdown here, select the number of your COM port. Then, make sure the baud rate and other settings are correct. You can select the baud rate from the dropdown, or type it in manually.

With all of those settings adjusted, you'll have to click "Open" twice to close and re-open the port clicking "Change" doesn't work until after you've established a connection on a COM port. That's all there is to that! Type stuff in the black ether above to send data, and anything received by the terminal will pop up there too. The ability to send long sequences of binary, hexadecimal, or decimal values is what really sets RealTerm apart from the other terminal programs we've discussed. To access this function, head over to the "Send" tab.

Then click into either of the two text boxes next to "Send Numbers". This is where you enter your number sequence, each value separated by a space. Once you have your string typed out, hit "Send Numbers" and away they go! Why would you need this you ask?

This is a pretty cool setup -- you can control a 7-segment display by just typing in your terminal. But what if you wanted to dim the display? You'd need to send two sequential bytes of value and 0. How would you do that with the handful of keys on a keyboard? Just as you can use RealTerm to send literal binary values, you can also use it to display them. On the "Display" tab, under the "Display As" section are a wide array of terminal display choices.

You can have data coming in displayed as standard ASCII characters, or you can have them show up as hex values, or any number of other display types. Incoming bytes are displayed as hexadecimal values. Can you decode the secret message?! RealTerm is preferred for more advanced terminal usage. We'll use it when we need to send specific bytes, but for more basic terminal applications, TeraTerm is our go-to emulator.

YAT is a user-friendly and feature-rich serial terminal. It features text as well as binary communication, predefined commands, a multiple-document user interface and lots of extras.

YAT is available to download at SourceForge. YAT features a multiple-document user interface MDI that consists of a single workspace with one or more terminals. Each terminal can be configured according to the device it shall be communicating with. These extra features make a terminal especially easy to use:.

Each terminal has its own monitor to display outgoing and incoming data. The view can be configured as desired:. Most of these features can be enabled and configured, or hidden for a cleaner and simpler user interface. YAT is fully hosted on SourceForge. Feature Requests and Bug Reports can be entered into the according tracker. Both trackers can be filtered and sorted, either using the predefined searches or the list view. Support is provided by a few simple helps integrated into the application, some screenshots on the SourceForge page, and the project's email if none of the above can help.

YAT is implemented in C. NET using Windows. The source code is implemented in a very modular way. NET based application that needs serial communication, command line handling or just a couple of convenient utilities.

Testing is done using an NUnit based test suite. Project documentation is done in OpenOffice. CoolTerm is useful no matter which operating system you're using. However, it is especially useful in Mac OS where there aren't as many terminal options as there are in Windows. You can download the latest version of CoolTerm here.

To change the settings, click the Options icon with the little gear and wrench. You'll be presented with this menu:. Line mode doesn't send data until enter has been pressed. Raw mode sends characters directly to the screen. Once all your setting are correct, the Connect and Disconnect buttons will open and close the connection.

The settings and status of your connection will be displayed in the bottom left corner. If you need to clear the data in the terminal screen, click the Clear Data icon with the large red X on it.

If you're getting annoyed with not being able to use the backspace, turn on 'Handle Backspace Character' under the Terminal tab under Options. One awesome feature of CoolTerm is Hex View. Click the View Hex icon. The terminal's appearance will change slightly. The first column is just keeping track of line numbers.

Notice the 0D and 0A that appear for carriage return and line feed. You can also use the Send String option to send entire strings of text. In the connection menu, select Send String. ZTerm is another terminal option for Mac users.

Compared to CoolTerm, it seems a lot less user friendly, however, once you find your way around, it's just as useful. This can be annoying if you have multiple connections available. This will bypass the auto connect and ask you to which port you'd like to connect. Serial communication tutorial If your instrument has shipped with RS default for most or RS serial communications , you can issue simple ASCII commands to gather data from your instrument and change how it operates.

Video tutorial. See instructions here. This site uses cookies to improve your browsing experience. By continuing to use this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy Accept and Continue.

Close Privacy Overview This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. The serial port configuration page opens.

Select Hardware , Software , or None from the drop-down menu. See the manual for your control terminal to check if a hardware handshake is needed. See the manual for your control terminal to check if a software handshake is needed. None No flow control is used. Only select this if your control terminal doesn't use a handshake. Click Apply. Controlling your Pearl system with RS You can use the null-modem cable and your control terminal software to issue commands to your Pearl system , such as when to start or stop recording, and to retrieve or set the value of certain parameters.

The following table describes the supported RS commands. This can alternatively be accomplished with the following set commands: SET. Snapshots are saved with recording files on the. Example: VAR. Check the for more details. Global variable RS commands for custom layouts You can use RS commands to create global variables embedded in a custom layout as responsive text overlay elements.

Important considerations Each system variable must have its own unique name. System variable names and variable values are case sensitive. Each variable name must start with a letter or underscore and can be up to 32 alphanumeric characters length, including underscores. Setting an empty variable name clears the variable value. Ensure your terminal program is configured for UTF-8; otherwise, any special characters used in the RS global variable command will cause the RS command string to be ignored.

There is a limit of total unique system variables per system. System variables can be used in text labels across any number of channels. System variables are considered volatile data and are erased when the Pearl system reboots. Quotes are not ignored. No flow control is used. Recording Commands. Starts recording for all channels and recorders.

Takes a snapshot image of the current channel supported only if the channel is configured to use the Motion JPEG codec.