Hex mode in Serial Com

[shantanu@india]

Hi,
I know this is not Les's domain since he is not involved with the IDE GUI & add-ons but can the "Transmit" & "Receive" windows in Serial Com integrated with the IDE have some kind of hex enable option? Otherwise it is difficult to work with a serial monitor that can send & receive only printable ASCII characters.
Nowadays I am using Hercules to debug UART packets.

[JohnB]

I have written a couple of serial monitor programs that can display in hex.  TBH there are so many freebee programs you're better off using one of these.  I might one day add one in to Positron Studio probably running in the bottom Window.

[JonW]

Usually, you have to do this yourself; I wrote one in VB many moons ago called serial debug with the Hex option (I don't have the installers anymore, but they may exist somewhere online in the server backups. However, I think they were written under win XP). 

Lately, I have written several serial GUIs in Xojo and used Monkeybread MBS APIs; these are good as you can directly control the RTS/CTS pins and also include Hex encoding, which makes it easier to produce bootloaders.

Are you looking at sending small packets and receiving ASCII, or do you need Hex on both ends?

[shantanu@india]

Thanks for the replies.
Actually its a bother to switch between Positron & something like Putty/Hercules while developing code. For me it is always raw hex since the devices talk in Modbus RTU.
As John said lots of freebies are floating around.

[keytapper]

I found YAT a good freeware for most of the cases.
If it's necessary to sniff the traffic, com0com comes into place.