Hardware how do i know a serial device is properly connected?

[migles]

my boss has an old ass barcode scanner, which is used to manage stocks on his shop some years ago..
however this thing lost the battery and needs to be programmed again..


i am trying to connect this thing to the pc it uses a serial port. there are no drivers, but i got the software to connect it.. however the software is saying the port is not available, or can't communicate (the error is pretty generic)

is there a way to tell the computer can see the device? i am not even sure if the cable is working. the cabe is a standard serial port, and in the other end there is a proprietary port

 

[gudenau]

How old exactly?

 

[FAST6191]

My preferred solution. Spend a small sum and buy a USB one they appear as a keyboard and function just like that -- anything that takes a USB keyboard should work with it and spare you all this hassle. If you want a pain in your arse then go bluetooth which will do much the same and appear as a keyboard. If you do go bluetooth you might even get it to talk to a phone/tablet and then you will be 10 times the tech wizard you are already, you might also be able to do it with the camera on a phone but those are a bit more picky. If your legacy thing happens to be some kind of omnidirectional and any orientation thing which works in direct sunlight then so be it.

As you asked though. What version of windows? I would say more modern ones but XP falls under this and apparently it is old now. Most used a little program called giveio, not sure where I can point you for a download for it right now though.

Anyway the basic thing once you have giveio sorted is the telnet program (there is a reason serial is an option in putty). I find most use it to speak to old printers https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/terminal-basics/command-line-windows-mac-linux covers another method, electronics like that is probably the main user of serial these days so I would suggest looking through those.

You can also do things like http://realterm.sourceforge.net/ if you want to get a bit fancier.

 

[gohan127]

allot of serial port devices will send some data when power is applied to it and they boot up. if you got any serial port terminal software you'll see garbage data come by if you have the wrong baudrate selected, if you see english readeable text then youre on the right baudrate and you should be able to send commando's back to it. for compatibility you might need hyperterminal, it's allready installed on windows xp and you can download it if you are on windows 7 and up. sometimes you need to turn on handshakes in hyperterminal.
good luck.