Remoting the Serial Port - Solution

[craiglindley]

NetBurner code development usually requires a physical RS-232 connection between the development PC and the NetBurner hardware. This connection is necessary so that useful information can be displayed via the debug serial port. I found this arrangement limiting as I didn't always want to be in the same room as the hardware. As a result I was determine to remote the debug port across the network so I could write and debug code from anywhere without any additional hardware being required..

To this end, I combined a piece of code called dualstdio (the author of which is unknown to me) with a stand alone network terminal program called NetTerm which I wrote. This results in the serial debug port being remotely available across the network. If you type a character into the NetTerm window, it is sent across the network to the NetBurner device just as if it had been typed into the MTTY window and any output from the NetBurner device is displayed remotely in the NetTerm window.

NetTerm can also remotely reset a NetBurner device so you can regain control of the hardware if your software runs wild (at least in most cases).

I should mention that NetTerm is written in Java so you must have Java 1.4 or newer installed on your development PC to use it.

All code and documentation is contained in the file remoteserial.zip.

I hope this is helpful to the NetBurner community.

Craig Lindley

[rnixon]

Thanks Craig, this looks very useful.