version 1.0d June 19, 2000

This program (SerialSender.exe) is a tool for sending strings of text through your computer's serial port. Users of our serial displays should find it useful for demonstrating display features without resorting to a terminal program.

Terminals sometimes block or translate certain control characters. They can also be complicated to set up, and may require hardware handshaking or workarounds. Serial Sender is easy to set up, and does not require any handshaking.

Installing Serial Sender

Copy the program (Serial Sender.EXE) and DLL (Sersen05.DLL) to the hard drive of your Windows 95/98/NT PC. If desired, create a shortcut to the .EXE and place it on your desktop. Double-click the program or shortcut icon to run the program.

There is no install utility for this program, which requires no further support files of any kind. All that is required is that the .EXE and .DLL files exist in the same folder of your hard drive. If you get an error message stating that a "required API" is missing, double-check that the .EXE and .DLL are in the same folder.)

Click the radio buttons corresponding to the desired baud rate and comm port number. Type text into the text box. Click Send or press ALT-d on your keyboard. The text will be sent to the serial port.

You can embed any control character in a text string by enclosing its ASCII value in angle brackets like so < # > where # represents the number to be sent. For example, the ASCII code for "A" is 65, so you could send "A" (without the quotes) as < 65 >.

In addition, the program interprets letters placed in angle brackets as the corresponding control characters. < L > translates to control-L (ASCII 12, the formfeed character for printers, clear-screen for most of our displays (all except BPK-series).

Internally, Serial Sender uses our free serial-send DLL to process text and send serial data. So in addition to control characters and ASCII values, it also understands the names of instructions for many of our serial displays. For example, < CLS > sends control-L, the clear-screen (CLS) character for our advanced text and graphics LCDs. See the DLL app note for a list of named instructions you can use.

It's possible (albeit a bit laborious) to control our Mini SSC with Serial Sender. If you just need a quick demo or checkout, it's a good trick to know. Just type the three-byte control sequence like so: < 255 > < servo > < position >. For example, to send servo 3 to position 100, you would type:

Make sure there are no spaces anywhere in this sequence.

This version of Serial Sender is a complete rewrite (see below) and uses a couple of new (to us) programming and deployment techniques. We've tested it thoroughly under Windows 95 and 98 on a half-dozen PCs in our office. If it doesn't work for you, you can download the tried-and-true previous version here.

If you use this software under Windows 2000 or NT, we would love to hear from you regarding Serial Sender's performance (good or bad).

The latest version (1.0d) uses the Collake compression software, but not the DLL-bundling. Users were getting errors that indicated Windows could not find a particular function in the bundled DLL. This version sacrifices the small convenience of a single .EXE file for a more reliable configuration.

Version (1.0c) was written in Delphi 5 and relies on a DLL to process text and send serial data. Using products from Collake Software we bundled the DLL into the program and compressed the result. We have tested this combination under Windows 95 and 98 without any problems or anomalies. (We have licensed the compression utility, which seems like solid, mature software, but we're holding off on the DLL-bundling software until we're confident that it works in all environments.)

Previous versions (0.9 and lower) of Serial Sender were written in O'Basic '97 (a Windows scripting language from Celtech Software) in the course of evaluating the language as a means of writing and distributing utilities for our products. Unfortunately, Celsoft announced in 1999 that they were planning to discontinue development of O'Basic. Hence the switch to Delphi and alternative techniques (above).

• Version 1.0d. Same as 1.0c, but with DLL unbundled.
• Version 1.0c. Rewrote program in Delphi 5. Bundled DLL and compressed .EXE to 157kB.
• Version 0.9. Added clear-text checkbox. When this box is checked, the text box will be cleared after data is sent.
• Version 0.8. Modified the set-port routine to use new O'BASIC syntax, which requires a string variable for parity ("N" for none) instead of a symbol (literal N for none).
• Version 0.7. Fixed bug that prevented v0.6 from sending ASCII 0 (null). Changed variable that stores output data from a string (in which ASCII 0 is seen as an end-of-data marker) to an O'BASIC buffer with a separate counter.
• Version 0.6. Initial release, 12/09/98.

E-mail comments, suggestions, or bug reports to tech@seetron.com.  

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