RS-232 control ports are common in industrial and scientific equipment and are found in some Vivid Engineering products. Until recently, PCs typically included an RS-232 serial port as well as communication software (i.e. Hyperterminal), supporting easy user access.
Current PCs generally do not incorporate RS-232 ports. Hyperterminal, the communication software included in earlier versions of Windows, was dropped after Windows XP.
Fortunately, there are fairly simple workarounds to both problems:
Adding an RS-232 Port:
Adding an RS-232 port to a PC is easily accomplished with a USB to serial RS-232 adapter. These adapters are inexpensive and readily available online (i.e. Amazon). Vivid Engineering offers an adapter (USB-ADAPTER) that we have tested with our products.
Adding Serial Communication Software:
As mentioned, Hyperterminal was dropped from Windows after XP. This useful link describes Hyperterminal alternatives for Windows 7, 8, etc:
Please see the "HyperTerminal Alternative" and "Original XP Hyperterminal" sections for four software alternatives (including links). We have tested all four:
- Putty (free)
- TeraTerm (free)
- HyperTerminal Private Edition (purchase)
- Original XP HyperTerminal (copied from an XP computer)
There are likely other alternatives that will also work...
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