Serial Port Monitor --------------------- Program Features

Embedded computer systems frequently have serial port interfaces to either exchange data with other system components or to capture real time program status information. Developers frequently use a Personal Computer (PC) comm (serial communications) port and a common terminal emulator program, such as HyperTerminal (developed for Microsoft by Hilgraeve Inc. and distributed with Windows^®) or Procomm Plus (by QUARTERDECK CORPORATION), to observe data appearing on the PC's comm port and optionally transfer such data to an online file and/or printer.

While these commonly available tools provide basic monitoring capabilities, they have two specific weaknesses when used in this type of application:

• Poor handling of non-printing characters: One of the elements of interest for the developer is the occurrence of unexpected characters appearing on the serial interface. Such characters are frequently non-ASCII characters that are not displayed in a terminal emulator program and, even worse, can cause the program to lock-up.

• No data timing information: Timing is often a critical aspect of an embedded system. Common terminal emulator programs simply display characters as they arrive on the comm port interface. There is no information regarding the relative timing of individual characters, lines, or blocks of data. The lack of such information makes data captured to a file or printer of limited use in many attempts to analyze system behavior.

The retiSoft Serial Port Monitor program is specifically designed to address the shortcomings of common terminal programs when supporting developers of embedded computer systems. The key features of this program are:

• Support for all available PC serial ports: When the retiSoft Serial Port Monitor program starts, it checks the computer on which it is running for the presence of all serial ports in the range of COM1 to COM12. The user can select from all detected ports in the provided "pick list".

• Multiple capture modes: The user can have the program monitor for, and time-tag, (1) individual characters, (2) text lines (terminated by either an ASCII carriage return or line feed character), or (3) data strings (or blocks) separated by user specified quiet times.

• Multiple data captures: While the monitor is active, all data appearing at the selected comm port are displayed, using the selected capture mode, in the main display window. Additionally, the user can direct a copy of the displayed data to a specified file and/or to a specified printer.

• User annotations: To enhance the use of captured and printed data for test documentation, the user may insert arbitrary text notes into the record.

• Control over the event timer: Data elements, as controlled by the user selected capture mode, are individually time-tagged. The user can control the start/reset and stop of this timer, with a real time updated display on the main screen. This allows the timer to be synchronized with specific test cases. The 6-digit time-tag provides a range of 275 hours (about 11.5 days).

Naturally, the user may have multiple copies of the retiSoft Serial Port Monitor running concurrently to monitor multiple active comm ports.

The retiSoft Serial Port Monitor works through standard Windows^® printer services and therefore can output to any printer or pseudo-printer installed on your system. This includes fax programs and Adobe^® Acrobat^® (to create PDF files for electronic archives and distribution).

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