I was reading through some of the older post on various subjects and a common theme came up; hyperterminal or the lack of any kind of serial terminal programs on newer computers. Several people several times have suggested using putty and other semi-higher end programs that are shareware or cost $$. (Personally, I have not had any luck with putty and as such don't use it. ) Since I do a decent bit of programming in VB.net and VB 6, whenever I need to do some serial port work on my nerdkit or other chips, I just write a short program to manage my com ports and input/output as needed. Its pretty simple and I can easily tailor it to my needs in next to no time at all. Compared to some of the folks around and about, I am a novice programmer. With all the VB, C, C++, python, etc programming skills around here and other various electronics learning/creating sites, how come you don't see any homegrown terminal emulators around?? For the programmers, its a piece of cake to code your own serial terminal, but for the non-programmers out there its an annoying hurdle that adds an extra layer of hassle. I realize that the homegrown terminal emulators can really put windows in a hurting if you mess something up(ie crash out a com port while it use.. ), but it could be kept simple and relatively easy to use. and while there is always the issue of malicious people putting viruses and other such in the code, usually people weed that out and raise red flags over it... anyhow, what are some of you folks' opinions, comments, and other thoughts on this?

I use puTTy because it's simple to use. I wrote a class to handle serial port communication when making my Twitter doorbell but I don't see the need to expand that into a full application.

I like 6ofhalfdozen's idea. it'd be useful to have one half of the terminal output ASCII characters, while the other half output HEX values too. And maybe something that allows for a ASCII or HEX, or maybe even binary input.

I don't remember much about WinAPI but I could sketch a bit under linux with C, and someone here could port it to windows. What do you guys think? A NerdKit community terminal? Sounds useful.

Let me know if we should try it! Stan.

I'm not quite sure why you had trouble getting Putty working. It should be easier to set up then Hyperterminal ever was.

If you're looking for a more powerful terminal emulator checkout: Realterm.

You can do just about anything with it, even 'echo' serial traffic to a TCP port! Checkout the awesome 'Display As' options on the left hand side!!1!one!!!