RS232 to control lab equipment

Projects Discussion and Showcase Science and Measurement
14

Hi - Sorry for the old post rebirth but this topic fits my question and before I go buy some hardware it would be great if some one could provide some insight please :smiley: ?

Objective - Send a single command via a Arduino Uno R3 & RS232 to a piece of lab equipment, which returns a string of data. Then print a truncated version of this string to an LCD connected to the arduino.

Comm Setup:
Baud Rate - 57600
Data Bits - 8
Parity - None
Stop Bits - 1
Flow Control (handshake) - None

This was verified working with:
PC > USB to RS232 adapter > DB9 cable > Lab Eq.
Using putty, and I was able to send the cmd "ch1:diag" and putty returned the following string:
lamp: XX.7% Light:X.XV Cont: XX.7% Gain: X.XX SNR: XXX.X Mono: XXX.X

My Questions based on this thread:

  1. I need a MAX232 type shield to do this? like this unit

  2. If connected as follows Arduino > MAX232 type shield > DB9 cable > Lab Eq. During code development, how do I debug or monitor the RS232 response after I send my cmd to the equipment? Can i use Software.serial on pins 7,8? then pass the sting over to "Serial.print" on the USB D0, D1? just to verify my setup is working. Later I can add the LCD.

  3. Is the expected return string too big? I remember looking at Software.serial and its limits are 64 byte serial buffer?

thanks in advance!