SparkFun Forums

[elvand]

Comport monitor is a simple and useful application monitoring PC-RS232 (COM) port .You can sent and receive bytes with this application . Also you can see bytes received in hex/bin/decimal format and sent as decimal/string format.

FEATURE :

Auto detect your PC available Com ports.
Change transfer baud rate between 1200-19200 .
Change parity / stop bit / byte size and packet size manually.
Events on CTS/DSR.
Define end of line .
Exchange Hexadecimal , Binary , Decimal to them.
Sending data to port using string mode or decimal ( character ASCII code ) mode.
Receiving data from port in Hex/Dec/Bin mode.
Free to use.

See http://www.elvand.com for more details.

[stevech]

It would be good to put this on AVR Freaks.net Project section too. Wide audience.

[elvand]

It would be good to put this on AVR Freaks.net Project section too. Wide audience.

Thanks for your attention.

[newbie123]

how are you supposed to monitor data when the program give the message "com port damaged or in use"?

I thought this application was a serial port monitor program?

I would expect that a program that logs serial data SHOULD run in the background, even if the com port is in use by another application.

A good program is here:
http://www.hhdsoftware.com/Family/serial-monitor.html

I use this one all the time to debug serial devices. Never had a problem with it.

[thomasscherrer]

a similar also free PC SW here:
http://www.webx.dk/XMON/
offer many more things like real time curves
and many more baudrates, and stuff.
Xmon is not intended to be a smart terminal program,
but much more like curves and variables check,
if many variables are checked in terminal programs it tend to look bad,
also Xmon handle all datatype formats, also floats !

XMON is offcource used to connect ONE PC to ONE microcontroller,
and not to sniff what other programs sends to external devices !

XMON also uses it's own way to send data, look in the doc
with working C code to paste into your microcontroller project,
so you can start monitoring fast and easy.

[stevech]

Is the OP's program (and thanks for contributing) actually a terminal program? It would open the chosen serial port and display incoming characters and changes of state of the input RS232 signals, and perhaps generate/send characters.

A "monitor" program, by precedent, "bridges" on to a serial port and does not "open" it. Some other application opens/uses the serial port, and the monitor program just eavesdrops and reports/logs, usually with filters on data content, etc. Kind of like the Ethernet port monitor programs do, like EtherReal

[newbie123]

I guess the OP's program could be used to eavesdrop if the serial cable was spliced into and run to another port or another PC.

Generally i use avrterm.exe for doing this if the PC does not run XP. It is easy to switch to ascii, hex or even binary data modes, and the baud rate is easily adjustable while the program is running.

The HHD serial monitor requires windows XP. I have a PC running win98 for compatibility reasons on some apps.

elvand:
Since this is a free program, Would you care to release the source code?

[HDowns]

Here's a pretty good option. Serial Port Monitor. Not free, but can work on all OS since Win 9x.

--
Helen