People who are now reading this from the newest entry first will be wondering what I am talking about here… Well, I mentioned earlier I was having a problem with some hardware and software. Things were almost working, but not quite. I could not work things out. Nothing was making sense. Nothing at all. A few years back I bought a serial analyser. It cost me about $500 and I have not used it all that much. But there are times when it saves me so much time and effort. These days I use the hardware with the SerialSniffer software since it is at least windows based.

Anyway, what the Serial Sniffer does is allows me to see what is happening on a serial link in both directions at once. What I found was that the data coming in through the serial port was not being ‘seen’ by my software until a carriage return was sent. This was a revelation! It took me probably an hour of programming to fix this problem, but I have just got it working. Another case of a lot of time wasted, but lots more saved thanks to having the right tools on hand.

One other strange thing with the piece of software that I am working on there is that it needs to be manually recompiled each time I make changes to the code. This threw me for a while until I worked out that was what was happening. I will have to work out why this is happening – obviously it should not be. I suspect it might be related to installing the new version of VB.NET. We will have to wait to see if any other projects have the same issue.

Right now I should get back to programming…