free terminal emulator for USB-to-Serial-Console cable

[lylex]

Is there a Windows terminal emulator you can suggest for using AdaFruit's USB-to-Serial console cable....one that is freely available?
The ZOC software suggested in the Tutorial works fine (30-days free), but $80 to connect to a $35 computer?

I tried Cygwin's X-term, MochaSoft's Telnet, and Console2 from SourceForge. But I haven't figured out how to connect them to the Com4 port that the cable driver comes up at. I guess these are really Telnet programs, and I need a Terminal Emulator.

PuttyTel Serial config should work, I'd think, but I had difficulty there too. Your suggestions are welcome.

Thanks...Lyle

[westfw]

putty should work OK, though I found it a bit confusing to set up.
Bray's "Terminal" is highly recommended: https://sites.google.com/site/terminalbpp/
You should be able to copy hyperterminal from a windows XP system...

I had a great terminal emulator, way back when. I was gonna get rich competing with Crosstalk V1 (well, beating them to market, actually); Blindingly fast with great features, fit on a 360k floppy and ran in 64k of memory, IIRC. All x86 assembly language.
Instead I got a lesson in software publishing and legal issues

[lylex]

That did indeed work just fine.
Downloaded Hyperterminal from: http://digitizor.com/downloads/apps/hyperterminal.zip

Thanks....Lyle

[holaparc]

Since you brought up the serial subject.... is there any way to open the the notepad from putty terminal? I know if you do "sudo nano /XXX/XXX/xx.py " it will let you open the file for editing inside the terminal. Is it possible for a "pop up" of the text editor to come up and let's you edit the file?like open a program from terminal? OR "remote desktop" through serial?thank you and am sorry if it is a stupid question. I am just trying to figure out a way to run headless at school where the computers have putty installed.

[lylex]

holaparc, no when you're talking to the console over the usb-to-serial cable you're just transferring individual characters back and forth one at a time. You can't open or control any window. You need a video display into the hdmi or video port and then start up the windows system.

Once you've got windows working, if you opened a terminal window within it, from that command line, you could use nano or vim to edit a file as if on the console. Or you could start a visual editor, and the windows system would gladly pop up a new window with the editor in it.

...Lyle

[holaparc]

Thank you . I wish someone will come up wit a way to program it just like the arduinos . or at least run adafruits web interface through serial or USB

[ceratophyllum]

I know you asked for windows, but...honestly... try running some Debian linux on the PC. Windows terminals are always fiddly broken junkware. I can't believe people ask money for this garbage.

You will have decent terminal built-in and a relatively maintenance-free tool chain for your python, avr-gcc, and other development tools. This stuff really comes in handy when you want to use avr-dude to program other microcontrollers besides the one sitting in your Ardiuino board. Unless you can't handle typing apt-get upgrade/update every once in a while.

Also, with linux you will have alternatives to massively bloated development tools like Processing and the Arduino IDE. (Three or four lines of a shell script calling awk/gnuplot can often do the same thing as pages and pages of Processing java bloat. (Specifically, I'm thinking of the mightohm geiger counter graphing program. Hell, with <10 lines of script you can even make you a histogram and watch the Poisson distribution grow as the counts trickle in.)) The point is, /dev/ttyUSB0 is just a file and awk/sed/bash/python/perl/gnuplot/octave or anything you are comfortable with can read/write to it. The boring terminal emulation is built-in and preinstalled. But the initial learning is pretty tough at first.

I tried Cygwin's X-term, MochaSoft's Telnet, and Console2 from SourceForge. But I haven't figured out how to connect them to the Com4 port that the cable driver comes up at. I guess these are really Telnet programs, and I need a Terminal Emulator.

Have you looked in the /dev directory for tty files in cygwin'? There should be a file ttyUSBsomething or tty.cuSomething representing your USB serial port. You should be able to log into your rPi by running something like:

Code: Select all

screen /dev/ttyUSB0 9600

in an xterm. But I hear you, cygwin is a pretty achy-breaky linux. You might have to apt-get install screen, if it is not preinstalled. (btw, screen can do a LOT more than just talk to a serial port.) In any case, better to dual boot and use the real thing than waste time fighting with perpetually broken emulation...or whatever cygwin is.

Nevertheless, you should be able to access the serial port from cygwin. Take a look at this:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7918003/com-ports-dont-appear-in-cygwin