Read from Serial Port (UART)

[helz15]

Its Helz short for Helen... but to be fair, I am assuming you lot are all guys, so why shouldn't you assume i am too.

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

Its Helz short for Helen... but to be fair, I am assuming you lot are all guys, so why shouldn't you assume i am too.

Did you 'launch a thousand ships'

There are a few girls on here, but they are really a VERY small minority, there aren't many girls in the electronics trade

I used to take part in a national competition for "Sharp Electronics Service Engineer of the Year", and they had a separate category for girls - so every year in the final there were two women (one VCR & TV, one Microwave), and a few dozen men. Without the separate category, the women wouldn't have got through - not that they weren't good, because they were - but just because they were so massively outnumbered.

The TV/VCR lady was a very attractive young woman called Estelle, and the Microwave lady was an older lady called Betty (also quite attractive, and a lovely lady) - Betty worked with her husband, and he always made the final as well.

Incidently, I won the whole competition twice, and am still the current holder of the title - since they stopped running it the last time I won

 

[helz15]

Ah well i'm not really 'electronic' anyway, i'm an electrical designer, however part of my studies requires electronic knowledge, but i really struggle at it, i am completely out of my depth with alot of this stuff.
My area is power on oil and gas plants, and you don't find many girls there either!

oh and apparenly its not true that Helen of Troy was really pretty, lol.

Thanks though guys for being patient with me with this stuff, i do appreciate it.

How can i check if the program is actually recieving data? I have the DMM plugged into the serial port, is there some way i can 'push' the data through?

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

Ah well i'm not really 'electronic' anyway, i'm an electrical designer, however part of my studies requires electronic knowledge, but i really struggle at it, i am completely out of my depth with alot of this stuff.
My area is power on oil and gas plants, and you don't find many girls there either!

oh and apparenly its not true that Helen of Troy was really pretty, lol.

Perhaps she was really big, and pushed the ships into the water?

Congratulations on being a girl in a mans world, it's nice to see.

Thanks though guys for being patient with me with this stuff, i do appreciate it.

How can i check if the program is actually recieving data? I have the DMM plugged into the serial port, is there some way i can 'push' the data through?

A DMM isn't much help to you, a scope though would let you see what's happening to some extent. Just connect the serial port to your PC (via a MAX232 or similar), run Hyper Terminal, and set it for the correct speed, number of bits etc., ensure you set it to no handshaking. Then each time you hit a key it will be sent out the serial port, if you write your program to echo it back, you should see it appear on screen.

If you can't get it to work, unplug the micro-controller from it's socket, and link the transmit and receive pins of the socket with a piece of wire, this should echo keys back to Hyper Terminal as well, is it doesn't you have a hardware error somewhere.