Rs232

[Braks]

Hello,
Guys I have a little problem here and i was wondering if you
will dare to help. I am trying to connect my PC which is running on
windows 7 to a weighing scale via the serial port, however the serial
port doesnt seem to recognize it. The scale didnt come with any
drivers or installation CD but it has the serial port RS 232. In my
small code i developed using VB it shows that only two port are
present namely comm1 and comm2 but comm1 is been used by the modem
devices which came with windows. How can i be sure that the scale is
transmiting the signal to comm1 or not?

 

[Hawkeye22]

Can you write a program to read data from the comm port? If so, you should see data on the one port and not the other. Without the proper drivers though I think you are going to have a hard time operating the scale.

 

[palladin9479]

Anything on RS-232 doesn't need drivers to operate. Even modems and printers can be operated without drivers, although advanced functions will be limited on a model by model basis.

Braks do you have a manual from the scale developer that tells you the protocol the scale communicates in? RS-232 is just a connection protocol, it doesn't deal with the data transferred and how it should be handled. I'm going to assume that the scale is using 9600 baud and is unidirectional and thus doesn't need any connection information from the host PC. You can write up a quick and dirty program to scan comm2's buffers for data and just output that data to the screen.

Does your computer have two serial ports on the back? You might want to check the BIOS and see how it's configured with respect to Interrupt's and I/O ports.