Serial Port Control?

[Tom Lake]

I'm using Win 7 Ultimate 64-bit and I'd like to be able to enter text to and
receive text from an open text window using a dumb terminal connected to the
PC via a serial port. I've tried googling it but maybe I'm looking for the
wrong thing. Is there any software (free, preferably!) that allows I/O to a
window over a serial line? TIA

Tom Lake

 

[Rob]

I'm using Win 7 Ultimate 64-bit and I'd like to be able to enter text to
and receive text from an open text window using a dumb terminal
connected to the PC via a serial port. I've tried googling it but maybe
I'm looking for the wrong thing. Is there any software (free,
preferably!) that allows I/O to a window over a serial line? TIA

Tom Lake

See:
http://helpdeskgeek.com/windows-7/windows-7-hyperterminal/
HTH,

 

[Paul]

I'm using Win 7 Ultimate 64-bit and I'd like to be able to enter text to
and receive text from an open text window using a dumb terminal
connected to the PC via a serial port. I've tried googling it but maybe
I'm looking for the wrong thing. Is there any software (free,
preferably!) that allows I/O to a window over a serial line? TIA

Tom Lake

Try Putty. I use it here in WinXP and it works OK.

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html

The documentation did not say what command line syntax to use. To
help you, try something like this. I had to look through source
code, to find a line documenting what to type COM3 is my
USB to RS232 dongle.

putty -serial COM3 -sercfg 38400,8,n,1,X

The X is for XON/XOFF. I use that command for talking to a Linux
box running the console over its serial port. At least, until the
software installation completes, and I can use SSH over Ethernet.

I seem to have downloaded putty.exe 475,136 bytes. There looks to be
a different version for download now, which is slightly larger. Try the
HTTP link, as the FTP server may be broken on that download page.

HTH,
Paul

 

[Tom Lake]

"Rob" wrote in message

I'm using Win 7 Ultimate 64-bit and I'd like to be able to enter text to
and receive text from an open text window using a dumb terminal
connected to the PC via a serial port. I've tried googling it but maybe
I'm looking for the wrong thing. Is there any software (free,
preferably!) that allows I/O to a window over a serial line? TIA

Tom Lake

See:
http://helpdeskgeek.com/windows-7/windows-7-hyperterminal/
HTH,
--
Rob

Thanks for the quick reply!
I see how I can run HT on a PC and send text to the dumb terminal and
receive text from the terminal but I don't see how I can actually run
a Windows text program with all I/O going to the terminal. Remember, this
is a dumb terminal that only has RS-232. It has no capability to use
telnet,
ssh or other protocols. Am I missing something?


Tom Lake

 

[Paul]

Thanks for the quick reply!
I see how I can run HT on a PC and send text to the dumb terminal and
receive text from the terminal but I don't see how I can actually run
a Windows text program with all I/O going to the terminal. Remember, this
is a dumb terminal that only has RS-232. It has no capability to use telnet,
ssh or other protocols. Am I missing something?


Tom Lake

(I tried to fix the quoting on your WLM posting, but it's hard to fix manually.)

On a Linux or XWindows setup, you'd use XSendEvent to send synthetic events to
programs on the desktop. I've written simple programs before, to use that
facility, to send stuff between disparate environments.

This posting, claims the equivalent to XSendEvent, is Windows SendMessage.

http://linux.derkeiler.com/Newsgroups/comp.os.linux.development.apps/2009-02/msg00027.html

And this doesn't seem to be exactly the same thing.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms644950(VS.85).aspx

There's sort of an example here. You'd replace the source of the
input, with characters received from the COM port.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms646268(v=VS.85).aspx#displaying_input

The only benefit I see to doing this, is security - the ability to restrict what
the dumb terminal can do to the computer. Otherwise, perhaps you can use
a remote desktop setup, to chain two devices together and use Ethernet cabling
or Wifi for the interconnect. (TeamViewer?)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teamviewer

Eons ago, there were people running Unix boxes as terminal servers (timesharing),
so you could take a device with a large number of serial ports, a modem pool, and
allow say, 32 people to log in remotely and each operate a text only session. But
I don't know if anyone still offers such services or not.

Maybe this is the terminology I'm looking for - a BBS.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system

Paul

 

[Brian Gregory [UK]]

"Rob" wrote in message


See:
http://helpdeskgeek.com/windows-7/windows-7-hyperterminal/
HTH,
--
Rob

Thanks for the quick reply!
I see how I can run HT on a PC and send text to the dumb terminal and
receive text from the terminal but I don't see how I can actually run
a Windows text program with all I/O going to the terminal. Remember, this
is a dumb terminal that only has RS-232. It has no capability to use
telnet,
ssh or other protocols. Am I missing something?

No I don't think Rob or Paul understood what you wanted.

I think I do now, but unfortunately no way of achieving it comes to mind,
however I'll have a think and do a bit of Googleing.

 

[Stan Brown]

"Rob" wrote in message

[quoted text muted]
I'm looking for the wrong thing. Is there any software (free,
preferably!) that allows I/O to a window over a serial line? TIA

Tom Lake

See:
http://helpdeskgeek.com/windows-7/windows-7-hyperterminal/
HTH,

Please fix your quoting style. When you use that idiosyncratic
technique, and someone else follows up on it, it looks like you said
what you actually only quoted.

I'm aware that the recent updates to Windows Live Mail broke your
quoting style. Unfortunately that poses a painful choice to you:
either fix every quote manually, or get a real newsreader such as
Gravity or Forte Agent (to mention the two that come to mind at the
moment).

Thanks for your consideration!

 

[Mark Blain]

No I don't think Rob or Paul understood what you wanted.

I think I do now, but unfortunately no way of achieving it comes to
mind, however I'll have a think and do a bit of Googleing.

Ah, a command shell (console) that uses the serial port for its standard
input and standard output devices. The further explanation about running
a program helped to clarify things.

Unix/Linux allow "text terminals" and "dumb terminals" to be consoles.
Native MS-DOS and FREEDOS also allow dumb teminals to be consoles using
the CTTY command, like this:
http://www.lagmonster.org/docs/DOS7/z-ctty.html
Unfortunately, the CMD.EXE console program in Windows 7 does not have
CTTY. I suppose one could write a script or program to read a line from
the serial port, execute it as a "shell" command, and write back the
output.