Hang/freeze after running a while

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roger
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Re: Hang/freeze after running a while

Post by roger »

Here is another thought, since you mentioned that the OS has been receiving updates. I have had it happen that a Windows update included a new (or different driver) for a serial device which then caused issues in CoolTerm. Perhaps this happened on your machine as well? It might be worth rolling back the driver from within Windows, or downloading the latest one for your device, and see if that helps.
mcu8484
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Re: Hang/freeze after running a while

Post by mcu8484 »

Did some more tests and it appears that the baud rate setting is the root cause of the freeze. I am using USB serial so technically it can go up to 12Mbps but realistically I am not sure it's really that fast. The original baud setting in CoolTerm is 115Kbaud that always resulted in freeze after some time. I tried higher baud rates and finally at 4Mbaud I can run for 12+ hours with 10MB+ received without issue which is good enough for me. However, I am curious what is the proper way to determine appropriate baud rate for CoolTerm for USB serial connections? Does CoolTerm allocate different internal buffer size based on the baud rate? Should the baud rate be set to 12Mbaud? On the device side there is no actual baud rate setting that matters because it's USB serial.
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roger
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Re: Hang/freeze after running a while

Post by roger »

CoolTerm makes no distinction for different baudrates. It's strictly a hardware setting.
It's curious that you're only seeing this issue with 115,200 baud. This is one of the standard baudrates that all hardware and drivers are supposed to be able to support. Anything above 230,400 is considered non-standard, and there is usually no guarantee that it will work, although some USB/Serial chipsets can happily go quite high. I've run Silabs chips at 2Mbaud without a problem.
My recommendation to anyone who's had issues with higher, non-standard, baudrates is to switch to a standard one, and that usually resolves all issues. But it seems your case is the opposite. I'm suspecting there is some sort of funny interaction/incompatibility between your driver and hardware that causes this.
If you can set your baudrate to 12MBaud and it all works fine, then I'd say go for it. Drivers are supposed to complain when you're trying to use invalid configurations (CoolTerm should present you with an "Invalid Configuration" error window when that happens). I wonder what the actual baudrate is, though. I doubt it's actually 12MBaud, but I could be wrong. If you have access to the RX or TX signals and an oscilloscope, you can actually measure it.
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