sorry for the long delay, but had to take care of other things.

i see .... you implemented a recieve routine without HSERIN, by polling RCIF flag bit to see if it set, and if it did set, it emptied its register RCREG into an arrouy of bytes. Now, i'm guessing this can be done by interrupts also by enabling the RCIE bit and now we don't need to poll the flag bit, rather we just do whatever we need in code, then when the buffer fills the flag will be set, and we go to the interrupt routine, then we check for overruns etc. it makes sense.


is this the same way with transmitting a byte. if we store a byte into TXREG will that automatically be sent serially, (the moment it gets stored to TXREG) or how does it transmit? i'm guessing the TXIF flag is enabled when it finishes sending a byte correct?


I was able to get the PIC16F688 to talk to my PC (hyperterminal) via serial communication with its hardware USART using HSEROUT/HSERIN. I tried it at different baud rates and it worked perfectly! The only thing that i didn't like is that to do this i needed the MAX232 IC for voltage leveling, i was unable to communicate directly from the PIC. Is there any way of accomplishing this? i'v searched and i know it can be done, but it didn't work for me. any ideas?

by the way thank you bruce for your responses, they've been very helpful