Code for Send/Receive TTL/Comport Sample?

[Charlie]

RS232 (serial) is purely a dumb pipe. You toss a byte in one end and it pops out the other. It does a number of things you can ignore, like add and remove start / stop bits, sometimes buffer a couple packets, and so on, but for your purposes you get out EXACTLY what you put in. So you decide what the bytes mean. You could send binary / hex / decimal numbers, or ascii, or morse code, or make up your own - as long as the receiver you build can read what the sender you build sends.

If you use a commercial terminal program, it will send the ascii code for what you type. So if you type number "1" on the computer, what is sent is actually hex 31(decimal 49). The PIC gets hex 31. If you write a program in VB or any other language to send a hex 1 when somebody hits the "1" key (or any other key if you wish), then that is what the PIC will see. Nothing hard here. If you are coding both ends of the pipe, you have complete control.

When you want to talk to other devices or systems, you need to know what the existing convention is. So if you think you will talk to commercial terminal programs, or certain serial displays, you are better off sending ascii. If you will be doing machine to machine stuff where you control both ends, do what pleases you. But you won't find anything automatically translating here. In most programming languages, text is stored as ascii, so if you are using a language that defines variables as text, or integer, etc. then you can convert numbers to ascii by converting to text. PBP does not distinguish between types of variables, other than by size. (At least not 2.6) but does have some things to make dealing with text easier. Read the manual - it will help.

Clear as mud?