HyperTermainal and COM Ports on OSX

April 24, 2007 7:34 AM

I have an "Emulated" USB device that I connect to (and update) using Hyper Terminal on the PC. How do I do this from a Mac?

On the PC the process goes like this:

1. Connect the device
2. Look in Device Manager to find out which COM port it is using
3. Open HyperTerminal and create a new connection to that COM port
Click Send > File and select a .hex file
4. Confirm and the file is sent to the device.

Is there a way to do this from a Mac (non intel)?

posted by anonaccount to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

I haven't worked with it, but do you have hypercom / minicom (in the Terminal)? I seem to recall using one or both waaaay back in my UNIX serial days. I'm not familiar with their usage, though, nor am I sure if the Mac has them.
posted by fogster at 7:49 AM on April 24, 2007

Don't know anything about it - just going from fogster's answer, but minicom's available from MacPorts (main site).
posted by edd at 8:13 AM on April 24, 2007

I use minicom, but if you want a gui, ZTerm would be what you want.
posted by Cat Pie Hurts at 8:23 AM on April 24, 2007

Well, since modern Macs are derived from BSD (basically UNIX), they don't have "COM ports." Their equivalent are tty devices, stored in /dev.

I don't know how your USB device presents itself to the system -- you may need to install a driver in order to get anything to work. But for many USB-to-serial adapters, like the Keyspan, once you hook them up, a new device is created, usually called "/dev/ttyUSB0". (If you had a physical serial port on the machine, it would be "/dev/ttys0", and some adapters make different names, like "/dev/tty.KeySerial1", etc. The device name depends on the drivers installed for the device, so consult documentation.)

Anyway, there are some terminal emulators, similar to HyperTerminal, for OS X, but I don't ever bother using them. The easiest thing is to use the built in "screen" program.

Start it by typing "screen /dev/ttyUSB0" (or the appropriate name for your device). You should be talking to it directly...type away, just like you would in HyperTerminal. I think screen emulates a VT100 by default; if you need some exotic settings (start/stop bits, etc.) you may need to configure it, which I've never done.

To exit, press Control-A, Control-/ (Control-A is the default interrupt sequence so you can give commands to the screen program, and Control-/ exits.)

Here's the original source where I discovered this.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:13 AM on April 24, 2007

Kadin2048: using screen is a great way to do it, but OP mentioned (I'm assuming binary) file transfer as well. You're still going to need to go the fink/macports route to get ymodem/zmodem/kermit (lrzsz) support.
posted by Cat Pie Hurts at 11:17 AM on April 24, 2007