Keywords: Serial port communication in Windows 7 using Hyper-terminal and Putty, Putty, Hyper terminal in Windows 7

Some times you need to access serial port of your PC/LAPTOP to perform some actions like if you want to connect a GSM modem or if you are an Embedded systems programmer then to access program or interface your micro-controllers to your system.

If you are performing these tasks on either Windows or Linux then you will requires some program that can communicate with your hardware and system. In the old days, Windows used to be provided Hyper terminal but now from Windows Vista they don’t provide such a tool, could not understand the reason though .. 🙂

How ever you can still use Hyper terminal in Windows 7 as well as you can use other freely available serial communication utilities like Putty. Putty is a great and free tool and available for both Windows and Linux platforms.

Before I start please note that :

1. If your system does not have any serial port , you can still use a USB-to-Serial adapter When you buy a USB-to-Serial port adapter you will get a driver for it as well. This driver makes a virtual serial port in your system.

2. In Windows, serial port named as COM port.

3. If you want to use Hyper terminal than you have to download this file.

4. If you want to use Putty than download this file from here.

Now you have to follow below steps to communicate with your device:

Step – 1: Connect your device with your system through RS-232 cable or USB-to-Serial adapter and check whether it’s connected successfully or not.

(see step 2)

Step – 2: Open device manager and check for COM ports , it get assigned a COM port or not. See below screen shot.

If you are not aware about accessing device manager then follow this post.

Step – 3: Note down the “COM port number” as we will require it.

Step – 4: Check user manuals or other reference documents related to your hardware for the following information:

Above properties are critical to make the communication correctly, if you don’t configure these properties properly then you will get either junk data or no data.

If you are going to use Hyper terminal than follow Step-5 to Step-9 otherwise follow Step-10 to Step-12.

Serial Communication using Hyper Terminal

Step – 5 a Extract the downloaded “hypertermina.rar” file in your system, open the “Hyper terminal” folder and double click on hyper terminal application. You should see the window like the screen shot given below.

Step – 5 b Insert a name for the connection, for ex. “Techawarey_HT_Test”.

Step – 5 c Select your “COM” i.e Serial port.

Step – 5 d You will see the window like below screen shot. Set the values, you noted before remember i.e. According to your device requirements.

Step – 5 e Now you are ready to communicate with your device. I am inserting a screen shot which shows a messages received by the device.

Step – 6 a By default you wont see the character you type,but if want to see the character you type that is going to received by your device then you have to click on ‘properties’, you will see the window like below:

Step – 6 b Click on “settings”, you will see the window like below, click on ‘ASCII Setup’.

Step-6 c Select “Echo typed character locally”, see screen shot below:

Step – 7 a If you want to receive a file from your device the click on ‘settings’, then select ‘Receive file’ option.

Step – 7 b Choose the receiving protocol whatever your device support, see attached screen shot.

Step – 8 If you want to send a file , then select “Send file” option and sending protocol.

Step – 9 Similarly you can capture the text and save it in a file.

Serial Communication using Putty

Step – 10 Double click on downloaded ‘Putty.exe’, you will see a window like this:

Step – 11 Select ‘serial’, insert com port and baud rate value and click on ‘Serial’ (Left pan), you will see a window look like this:

Step – 12 Enter all the setting according your device and then click on open,

Step -13 After clicking on ‘open’, you will see a window like this, now you are ready to communicate with your device.

Putty is much more than a simple serial port communication tool, I will cover more on Putty in my future post.

For now, that’s all now you can communicate with your device using serial port, Please like and share if you find it useful.. 🙂 🙂