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Glenn Thomas Hvidsten edited this page Jan 30, 2016 · 5 revisions

How to use Open Serial Port Monitor

Connecting to a serial port

In order to receive and/or transmit data you first have to connect to a serial port. Look in the documentation for the serial device you want to connect to for a list of the correct parameters to use for that device. For a more detailed description of what each parameter actually means, please read the Serial Port page on Wikipedia

Connection parameters

Clicking the Connect button to open the connection to the serial port. If the device is actively sending data you will see data appearing in the data windows.

Reading received data

Data received from the connected serial device is displayed in three different ways. The Received data window displays data parsed as ASCII. The Raw data window displays the received data without any character conversion. On the left side the hexadecimal value of each received byte is display. On the right side the corresponding character (except for non-printable characters which are replaced with a . (period)). Because non-printable characters are not displayed, any carriage return / line feed are not displayed and everything is printed on one line (limited to 16 bytes per line)

Received data

Scrolling

Open Serial Port Monitor automatically scrolls to the last received data. If you continuously receive a lot of data and you try to scroll to the top it will jump to the bottom again almost instantly. To prevent this turn of Autoscroll in the View menu.

Sending data

Data can be sent to the serial device in two ways. Below you will find both described.

Text mode

The first mode is Text mode. Here the data will be converted to the proper bytes through ASCII and sent to the serial port. You can also send spesial characters using the following escape sequence:

Character Escape sequence
Carriage return \\r
Line feed \\n

See the following screenshot for an example

Send data as text

Hexadecimal (raw) mode

When you are sending data in Hex mode, the data you put in the input field will be sent as raw values to the serial device. You are only allowed to use hexadecimal values ranging from 00 to FF (0 - 255 in decimal). If you use any invalid values the Send button will be disabled.

The following screenshot sends the same data as in the previous screenshot, but as hexadecimal data instead.

Send data as text