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Thread ID: 57495 2005-05-04 05:45:00 Com Port Monitor Dannz (1668) Press F1
Post ID Timestamp Content User
351966 2005-05-04 05:45:00 Does anyone know of a program that can tell you what pins of a com port are turned on Dannz (1668)
351967 2005-05-04 09:42:00 I remember a dos program called "lights" which basically duplicated the modem lights so showed dce rce txd rxd etc. i dont know if it is still about! Take a gogle under lights.exe there is something there
Piva
piva (3796)
351968 2005-05-05 02:31:00 I've even written such programmes. ;) Pascal makes it easy. I've even used DEBUG. The Simtel archive will probably have a programme (or several). However, I have my doubts whether a programme would be allowed to access the registers directly in XP or any NT Windows.

One approach would be hardware. Jaycar sell a PA0886 "rs232 mini tester" which is a double DB25 with a bunch of LEDs to display the status of significant lines. (You might need 25-9 adapters to use on modern hardware).

To learn more than you ever wanted to know about PC serial ports, here are a few links:
courses.ece.uiuc.edu (exhaustive -- or exhausting )
courses.ece.uiuc.edu (have a look at section 12)
www.eecs.wsu.edu (useful)
Graham L (2)
351969 2005-05-05 03:28:00 If you know about ActiveX, Microsoft do provide MSCOMM, which works in XP and W2k, as well as the DOS based versions of Windows.

I've just found this link to MSCOMM functions (msdn.microsoft.com) in Everyday Practical Electronics. I don't know how useful that would be. Ilike Pascal. ;)
Graham L (2)
351970 2005-05-05 05:08:00 Thankyou for you ideas i will look into them Dannz (1668)
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