You can change communication port settings dynamically in Configuration toolbar, which offers the following options:
- Baudrate
Specify the rate at which bits are transmitted (bits per second). The baud rate is the rate at which information is transferred in a communication channel. In the serial port context, “9600 baud” means that the serial port is capable of transferring a maximum of 9600 bits per second. To be able to communicate at the maximum speed, both local and remote ends must be configured to the same baud rate and pass handshake stage before you can successfully read or write data.
Advanced Serial Port Terminal supports all standard baud rates (100, 300, 600, 1200, 2400, 4800, 9600, 14400, 19200, 38400, 57600, 115200, 128000, and 256000 bits per second).
- Data bits
Specify the number of data bits to transmit. Usually, the transferred bits include the start bit, the data bits, the parity bit (if used), and the stop bits. However, only the data bits carry useful information.
You can configure data bits to be 5, 6, 7, or 8. Data is transmitted as a series of five, six, seven, or eight bits with the least significant bit sent first (little-endian). At least seven data bits are required to transmit ASCII characters. Eight bits are required to transmit binary data. Five and six bit data formats are used for specialized communication equipment.
- Parity
Specify the parity checking type. Parity can be one of the following: none, odd, even, mark, or space. If Parity is none, parity checking is not performed and the parity bit is not transmitted. If Parity is odd, the number of mark bits (1s) in the data is counted, and the parity bit is asserted or unasserted to obtain an odd number of mark bits. If Parity is even, the number of mark bits in the data is counted, and the parity bit is asserted or unasserted to obtain an even number of mark bits. If Parity is mark, the parity bit is asserted. If Parity is space, the parity bit is unasserted.
- Stop bits
Specify the number of bits used to indicate end of a byte. Stop bits could be 1, 1.5, or 2, however almost all contemporary devices are configured to 1 stop bit. Please, note that both ends of serial port must be configured to transmit the same number of stop bits to work properly.
- Flow control
Flow control is usually used to ensure that the receiving serial port device can handle all of the incoming data sent to it. Advanced Serial Port Terminal provides the following values: Xon/Xoff (commonly used for asynchronous communication), Hardware and None.
Note: If a serial port doesn’t support definite settings (for instance, 256k Baudrate is not supported), the previous option will be selected automatically.