Settings of COM-ports in CoolTerm (2.0.0)

[tnm]

Greetings all.

I have two USB devices for which my PC's Device Manager has identified two COM ports: COM4 and COM5. The CoolTerm terminal is set to COM3 by default.

How to add COM4 and COM5 to the list of available COM ports?

tnm

[roger]

Hi,

If COM4 and COM5 are listed in the device manager, CoolTerm should have access to them. To select a different port, open the Connection Settings window via the "Options" button in the toolbar or the "Connection -> Options..." menu item. This will open the Connection Settings window. Go to the "Serial Port" page. If you recently added or removed serial devices, you may want click the "Re-scan serial ports" button to refresh the list of available ports. You can access the list of serial ports via the "Port:" popup menu. Select the desired port, adjust the port settings (baud rate, etc.), and click OK when you're done.
More information can be found in the built-in help, which can be accessed via the "Help" button in the toolbar or the "Help -> Help..." menu item.

I hope this helps.

Roger

[tnm]

Hi Roger,

Your instructions have helped. The practical steps for configuring COM ports plus the information in the "built-in help" helped me understand a lot about CoolTerm. Thank you.

Here is my report on what I did.

1) I connected an adapter based on pl2303 to the laptop's USB connector. The adapter has been attached to the Bluetooth module. The LED of the Bluetooth module started flashing.

2) Opened the Device Manager and found the COM port of the adapter:
Ports (COM and LTP)
Prolific USB-to-Serial Comm Port (COM5).

3) Then I clicked the shortcut "CoolTerm_Win7.stc" on the Desktop.
This opened the main window named "CoolTerm_Win7.stc" of the CoolTerm application.

4) Clicked "Connect". This key has become grayed out.

5) After that I tried to pass along the path:

Options -> Serial Port -> Serial Port Options -> Re-scan Serial Ports -> (popup menu) "Port" -> Desired port COM5,

but the "Port" option of the "Connections Options (CoolTerm_Win7.stc)" window was greyed out. It turned out to be impossible to see the result of the "Re-scan Serial Ports" command.

6) By clicking "Help…" at the bottom of this window, I found out that "The port cannot be changed while the connection is open. Close the connection first to change the port."
To close the connection, I returned to the main window and clicked "Disconnect" on the toolbar.

7) Having closed the connection, I returned to the "Connections Options (CoolTerm_Win7.stc)" window and clicked "Re-scan Serial Ports".
The "Port" popup menu included COM3, COM5, TCP Connection.

So, the required COM5 port is added to the list of available ports.

Comment.
When COM5 was first selected after step 7, the bevel button did not work. It started working after going to COM3 port and back to COM5.

The Bluetooth module LED continued to flash during the described settings.
Is it possible to continue the settings so that the LED does not blink, but starts to glow constantly ?

tnm

[roger]

Hi,

I'm glad you were able to figure how to select and connect to the desired serial port.

A blinking blue LED on your bluetooth module PROBABLY means that it is either in pairing mode or ready to accept bluetooth connections. So it is probably waiting for another device to make a connection over bluetooth. A constantly-on blue LED probably means that such a device has successfully connected. But I'm only guessing. The documentation for your bluetooth module should have more information on that.

Once you select COM5 and connect to it, then you should be able to send commands to the bluetooth module from CoolTerm with they keyboard. The documentation for the module should include information on what commands it can accept. Do you have a link to the documentation online you can post here?

Roger

[roger]

Comment.
When COM5 was first selected after step 7, the bevel button did not work. It started working after going to COM3 port and back to COM5.

Thanks for reporting this. I have confirmed that this is a bug that prevents this button to not be populated with information when the settings window first opens. It was only populated when a selection from the port popup menu was made. This will be fixed in the next release.

Roger