I have an Olympus MX61 I’m trying to connect to my PC through the serial connection.
I have the settings from the installation manual:
Transfer rate 19,200 [bps]
Data bits 8 [bits]
Parity Even
Stop bits 2 [bits]
Flow control None
(CTS control applied only after power ON)
Terminator CR+LF (ASCII codes 0x0D, 0x0A)
(Line feed code)
I’m unable to get any response from the microscope. Does anyone have any suggestions?
Are you using the correct type of serial cable? It looks like it should be a “straight” cable and not a “cross-over” (or “null-modem”) cable.
I’ve redone my setup and confirmed I’m using a straight-through cable.
I’m using PuTTy to try and connect to the port and I’m still not having any success, the terminal just hangs.
Cant enter in any input or receive any output
My recollection is that PuTTy has a “echo” setting and that without that turned on you can’t see what you are typing so it might look like you can’t enter any input.
Do you have another device that you know works that you can test the cable with?
Perhaps you have the wrong terminator character sequence?
Not sure how likely this is, but I think that not all RS-232 adapters actually have all the wires connected. In the simplest case you only need 3, GND, RXD and TXD, so some USB to serial chips don’t support RTS/CTS (hardware flow control). From a Stackoverflow question:
“The startech site currently lists multiple USB ↔ serial cable products. And those different products use different chipsets, i.e. at least FTDI and Prolific ones. And only the Prolific ones seem to support hardware flow control.”.
EDIT: It looks like the MX61 only uses CTS to indicate that it is ready to receive commands, so as long as you wait long enough for it initialize it shouldn’t matter if this is connected or not.
The cable has all wires connected. My local surplus store had a cable tested and was able to confirm all wires functioned and it is a straight-through RS-232.
My serial port is a standard DB-9 and here is a screenshot of my com settings
The MX61’s manual is confusing with the settings needed. It says None for flow-control but then states it’ll go into CTS after initialization, does this mean I should set the flow-control to hardware?
I switched from PuTTY to Coolterm and it looks like the microscope never transitions to CTS after initialization (front panel stops blinking and it accepts button presses). Screenshot below has the connection at over a minute and CTS is still off. I have all the DIP switches set to off and I’m not sure why it doesn’t switch to CTS.
I agree that the manual is confusing, but I think it is saying that you should not use hardware flow control and that the CTS line is only used to indicate the device is ready. I don’t know if this is a standard use for the CTS line or not.
Maybe you could try with micro-manager to see if that works? Or look at the device driver code to see what setting might be missing? MM Driver.
I think the issue is low level communication setting. I’ve gone ahead and ordered a PCIe serial card and it should be here early next week. Currently I’m using a serial connector plugged straight into the mother board, it’s a 9-pin connection but there’s no orientation notch/post. I’ve tried it with the connector flipped and Coolterm indicated a RI signal but it still did not communicate.
When I try to use micro-manager I get serial time out errors, I haven’t been able to find to find a solution online for what causes serial time out errors. Here’s a screenshot of the error; with my com port settings up on the left side
I replaced my serial card with a StarTech PEX2S953LP and that resolved the issue. MM is now communicating with at least the OlympusHUB. I’ll keep working on trying to communicate with the objective turret.
Thanks @Hazen_Babcock !
