Need a good free Win10 Terminal program

erco

Senior Member
Need to enter & send 3 bytes of serial data from a Win10 terminal program or emulator to a 20M2 using SERIN though a serial/USB adapter. Standard 4800 8N1 comms. Any recommendations for free software? I just downloaded Realterm from https://sourceforge.net/projects/realterm/ so I'll start with that tomorrow unless someone has a glowing recommendation. TIA.
 

lbenson

Senior Member
puTTY provides serial terminal, ssh, telnet: https://www.putty.org/

PICAXE terminal should also work. Serial/USB module is typically going to be "idle high", so, for example, T4800_4 for the SERIN statement.
 

Pongo

Senior Member
AccessPort is my current favorite. I've not tried it with W10 but should be OK.

Realterm is OK, I'm not a big fan though. As far as I know you can't save the configuration within the program, but you can set the parameters on the command line or in a desktop shortcut, for instance ""C:\Program Files (x86)\BEL\Realterm\realterm.exe" PORT=5 BAUD=9600 DISPLAY=2" so you don't have to reset every time you open the program.
 

erco

Senior Member
Good recommendations, thanks I'll check those out. Meanwhile I did use Realterm to confirm a serial communications problem. My robot chassis uses a slave 20M2, controlled by receiving 3-byte chunks of serial data. Works perfectly at 4800 baud but only when receiving commands from a Picaxe master. RasPi master would not work so I used Realterm to discover that the first two bytes read fine but everything after was corrupted. Works fine at 2400 baud though. Just enough off-spec to cause a problem at 4800.
 
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Janne

Senior Member
The RPi serial problems might be caused by the soft uart. The bluetooth-enabled raspis default to having the hardware uart toggled to serve the bluetooth module, while the uart pins are driven by software implementation which quite frankly sucks. You can disable the BT and use the hw uart for the tx/rx pins which seems 100% reliable.
 

erco

Senior Member
That's interesting, but since PC-based Realterm didn't work either, that seems to indicate an inherent calibration problem on the Picaxe end. Pretty disappointed that slow 4800 doesn't work outside the Picaxe ecosystem at the default clock speed of 4 Mhz. I wonder how far off spec it is at N76800_64...!
 

hippy

Technical Support
Staff member
To send raw binary bytes from Windows 10; I haven't found anything better than the PE6 Terminal window.
 

erco

Senior Member
Yesssshhhh, but my non-Picaxe clients who are using this want to use a generic serial terminal program.

Hippy, any comment on the low baud rate I had to use? Is it a known sync issue?
 

hippy

Technical Support
Staff member
Yesssshhhh, but my non-Picaxe clients who are using this want to use a generic serial terminal program.
Ah; you didn't mention that part of the requirement.

Hippy, any comment on the low baud rate I had to use? Is it a known sync issue?
It is probably that the Pi and any PC is using a hardware UART and, when sending data bytes back-to-back as they tend to, the PICAXE isn't able to keep up using SERIN.
 
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