PC monitors two-way RS-232 transmission
Jerzy Chrzaszcz, Warsaw University of Technology, Poland -- EDN, February 1, 2001
The goal of monitoring transmission in a data link is obvious: You want to know the contents of the data, when it was sent, and by whom. If one of the communicating parties is a PC or another user-programmable controller, then you can modify parameter settings or, at worst, change transmission routines to generate log files or perform other actions. This approach, however, may be inconvenient or impossible to apply in some cases. As an alternative approach, you can use a PC with two serial ports and a monitor program to observe the link itself. The method in Figure 1a needs no access or knowledge of the communicating devices. A C program opens two COM ports and installs interrupt-service routines for IRQ4 and IRQ3. Upon the reception of an interrupt, the routine stores a byte in a common circular buffer with the COM identifier and error flags. The main program displays the contents of the buffer, indicating time intervals in milliseconds between consecutive transfers. Although the program simplifies the time measurement, it preserves the original byte order and correctly reflects time relationships as long as the main program keeps up with transmission speed. If you need greater precision, you can easily modify the program to record time stamps, along with the data and status bytes, in the circular buffer.
Unfortunately, not all PCs offer two COM ports. This deficiency is a common drawback of notebook computers, which use a second UART controller for IrDA communication. But you can use even these computers with another version of C to monitor the bidirectional link, provided that the transmission is not full-duplex. A simple interface mixes both data streams onto the receiver input (Figure 1b). One channel connects to the RI (ring indicator) input of the UART. Whatever the byte value, the start bit guarantees that the RITD (ring-indicator trailing edge) bit in the modem-status register is set. The interrupt-service routine reads the register, clears the RITD flag, and stores its value in a buffer. Thus, the interface is ready for another byte to come from an arbitrary direction. The main program can identify the data source by checking respective bits. Click here to download the C listings and executable files. The programs are simple and accept 9600, 8, E, and 1 transmission parameters. You can easily adapt the programs to other formats.
