Can we have a new Serial Terminal please ?

[Buzby]

The Picaxe Serial Terminal is my no.2 tool for debugging,( after the simulator ), but sometimes I have to use a 3rd party terminal if I need a bit more control of the screen. This entails using up another USB port, another cable, and forever swapping.

It would be really useful if the PE Terminal had a simple switch to turn on ANSI/VT100 mode, so it could behave a bit more like a 'real' terminal.

( Within PE6 it might even be possible to define a 3rd party terminal as an option, but that might not work well for simulation or programing. )

What does the forum think ?.

Cheers,

Buzby

 

[Hemi345]

I haven't run into an issue where the various options in the settings menu hasn't fixed a display issue or Rx/Tx need. It would be handy though if much of these settings could be included in the GUI rather than being tucked away in the settings menu. Do folks use the DSR,CTS,DTR,etc buttons much? What I think would be handy is the ability to customize the PE Serial Terminal (PE ST) "ribbon" bar to include the settings we need and remove the ones we never use to maximize usable receive buffer space.

Also, not to hijack this thread, but still talking about the PE ST, I'd like to mention these two issues I'm encountering:

a) Have PE ST be aware of the baud rate defined in the program to automatically switch the terminal baud rate to match when programming.
b) implement a watchdog to determine if the terminal is no longer functioning.

With regards to a), I have a project that has two PICAXE chips mounted on a PCB. The 20X2 runs at 16Mhz while the 14M2 runs at default 4Mhz. I have #terminal 19200 and #terminal 4800 in both programs respectively. If the PE ST is not running, after programming the 20X2, it will automatically open with the correct baud rate to match. But then if I program the 14M2 without terminating the PE ST, I have to manually switch the baud rate. It would be great if it would automatically switch the baud rate to match the program that just downloaded to the PICAXE (or offer us the option to toggle on that feature)

For b), it seems after 10 or so programmings while leaving the PE ST running, it will quit responding and CPU use goes up dramatically. I've had this issue on three PCs so far, over multiple versions of PE6 so I can't blame my computer or hardware (I'm using an AXE027 almost exclusively now too). I know when this happens as my laptops cooling fan will kick into high gear. Nothing I do within PE ST will fix it, I have to close and reopen it.