Gilderfluke&Co BR-SmartMedia - Manual (Page 32)

Serial Port Commands
The BR-SmartMedia can be accessed through the serial port from any
computer running just about any modem or terminal program. The com-
puter you are using doesn’t even need to have any PC•MACs software in-
stalled on it.
Most Gilderfluke & Co. products can be controlled through their RS-422
Serial ports. Up to 256 different cards and devices can be attached to the
same serial lines, to form a complete RS-422 ‘MultiDrop’ network. Operator
panels can be attached anywhere on this network to access and control it,
or you can use a telephone or Internet modem. The latter two allow a sys-
tem to be accessed from around the block or around the world.
Commands can be addressed to a single card on the network, or all the
cards simultaneously.
One of the easiest and most flexible types of operator interfaces for ac-
cessing the serial network are the many touch screen operator panels.
These are available from a number of different suppliers, and most of them
will easily attach right to our MultiDrop serial network. Most of these allow
you to ‘draw’ whatever buttons and user interface icons on their screens
(using a provided Windows program), attach ASCII strings to these ‘buttons’,
and then download the final configuration to the operator panel so the PC
can be taken away.
Typical modem programs you can use with Gilderfluke & Co. equip-
ment are Terminal.exe (which came with Windows 3.1) and HyperTerm.exe
(which comes with later versions of Windows), or GilderTerm. The shareware
Z-Term or earlier releases of AppleWorks (which included a terminal pro-
gram) can be used on Macintosh computers.
GilderTerm is available free from Gilderfluke & Co. for use with all of our
products. It can be downloaded from our web page, and is included on all
of our CD-ROMs. GilderTerm has been optimized for use with all Gilderfluke
& Company equipment. All the commands are built in, and it will even let
you use your mouse to select commands.
To use the BR-SmartMedia with a terminal program, just configure it for
9600 baud, no parity, eight data bits, one stop bit and ‘xon/xoff’ handshak-
ing. If you are using GilderTerm, all the settings are preset. All you will need
to do is select the appropriate ‘COM’ port.
G
ILDERFLUKE
& C
O
.• 205 S
OUTH
F
LOWER
S
TREET
• B
URBANK
, C
ALIFORNIA
91502 • 818/840-9484 • 800/776-5972 •
FAX
818/840-9485
E
AST
C
OAST
/F
LORIDA
O
FFICE
• 7041 G
RAND
N
ATIONAL
D
RIVE
• S
UITE
128d • O
RLANDO
, F
L
. 32819 • 407/354-5954 •
FAX
407/354-5955
24 of 81