Lorenzo Luengo wrote:
> I'd like to get some suggestion on terminal emulators, to avoid
> running into this problem.

Hyperterm is useable enough if what you really want is a terminal emulator.
The problem was that somebody tried to use it for more than that without
bothering to understanding it or apparently ASCII text interchange in
general.

That said, I find need for a true terminal emulator to be very rare.  Using
ASCII text as a communication protocol with a small embedded system makes
little sense.  Mostly you want a binary protocol, since that's much easier
to generate and parse in the resource-limited system.

Usually I use my TEST_SIO program for simple cases and maybe the early
stages of debugging.  It allows you to send and receive individual binary
bytes.  They can be specified in decimal, hex and other number bases, and a=
s
ASCII text.  The received bytes are shown in decimal, hex, and ASCII.

Normally I write a dedicated test program for each project that needs to
communicate with a host.  This is easy to do, and provides a text based
command line interface to the binary protocol.  As a project evolves, extra
commands get added for testing and debugging, and this provides a natural
platform.  It also sets up the serial line exactly as needed.  You really
don't want to tell your customers to run Hyperterm and have to specify a
bunch of settings they have to make before things work.  If you give them
the dedicated test program instead, they only have to specify the serial
port (with default to COM 1 of course) and everything else just works.

Again, keep it as simple as possible in the small embedded system and push
the complexity of providing a user interface to the host where it's easy to
do.

--=20
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