How about the ability to send out a message at a given baud rate?
An "Is this thing receiving?" message could be helpful in knowing
if you had the right connections, serial port, etc in your terminal
software.

Jon



At 12:31 PM 3/16/2007 -0700, you wrote:
>If you were going to put a little microcontroller (like a PIC) and a small
>LCD display in a serial cable, what sort of information would you want the
>LCD to display?
>
>We are talking like 8 characters here, not a 4x20. It might even be an LED.
>
>But as long as the PIC has to be there anyway, why not have it do something
>interesting?
>
>Here are my initial ideas:
>- Auto detected baud rate. It might not always be totally accurate, but it
>would be nice to have a sanity check on the data being sent... "Did this
>thing not get set to 9600?" "Oh, it's sending at 19.2... No wonder we are
>just seeing garbage"
>
>- Parity. If it appears that there is a valid Parity in the stream after
>some number of bytes, put an "E" or "O" on the display or light an LED next
>to a printed "P" green for Even, red for Odd.
>
>- Stop bits?
>
>- Last character through the cable at the auto detected rate?
>
>- "+DTR", "-CTS" etc... For 1 second after the signal asserts or is
>released.
>
>- Blank display 2 seconds after the last signal goes through.
>
>So if you were connected to a device that was sending a string at 9600E81
>and your buffer filled up  you might see the following in sequence:
>
>"9600", "9600E81", "XOFF", "XON", "9600", " "
>
>What would you want to see, or think it would be possible to add?
>
>---
>James.
>
>
>--
>http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
>View/change your membership options at
>http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist


-- 
http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
View/change your membership options at
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist