On 4/25/06, Hazelwood Lyle wrote: > I own a Cybiko and keep it loaded with the serial terminal program. > I learned about all of that from this list. > > I have loaned it to our I.T. person, and now she wants her own. We have > a lot of equipment that uses LF terminated ASCII commands between > equipment. (Yeah, old school, but easy to troubleshoot!) > > I'd rather offer her an upgrade, the original Cybiko has battery > problems, > and often drops characters from the serial port. I looked for a newer > model, > but the next in series has moved to USB for comms. The serial port is > obviously necessary for our application. > > I'm thinking that some kind of handheld unit would work. I have no > experience > with Palm or other devices, I don't even know if any still have RS232 > serial > ports. The Cybiko is nice as it has a keyboard built in. If you go with a Palm (or any other screen-only device) you will either have to start using their handwriting recognition, or sacrifice screen real estate for an onscreen keyboard. That said, I have used the Palm as a serial terminal before and it worked quite well. I even made a small 5V to 3V convertor that lived in the battery compartment. Josh -- A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. -Douglas Adams -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist