If your PC is on the older side, you might be lucky enough to have a serial port on it already, and you can just plug your null modem cable in directly.īut if your PC was built any time recently, chances are it doesn’t actually have a serial port. Next, you’ll need to connect the serial port on your device (ALIX, APU, net) to your desktop PC. So, now you’ve got your terminal emulator software installed? Excellent. For this tutorial, I’m going to use Teraterm Pro.ĭownload your terminal emulator software of choice and install it. I use one called Teraterm Pro but PuTTY also works well. But it’s not very good, and there are many better, free alternatives. If you’re using Windows, then it comes with one called hyperterminal. Install terminal emulator softwareįirst you need to install a terminal emulator package. There are four steps you’ll need to follow to use a terminal emulator with your device. The awesome news is that we will give you one of these cables free of charge when you buy one of these systems from us, so you don’t have to go looking for one.

So, if you want to connect directly to one of these systems (none of which have keyboards or screens, also called “headless” systems) you have to use the serial port and a desktop computer running terminal emulator software, connected via a special cable called a null modem cable.

It’s pretty much universally recognised because the standard is so oldĪs far as the devices we sell at Yawarra, serial ports are standard on our ALIX, APU and net servers.

It can be supported directly in BIOS, and.

It can be shoved into a very small chip, that doesn’t cost much.It’s a much lower overhead than a Gigabit ethernet port, or wireless connection.In fact, they worked so well, that support for them is still built into new systems today, for a variety of reasons: When serial terminals were the norm, specific protocols were created to allow systems to communicate over serial lines, and these protocols worked really well. So now, instead of a big clunky green screen and keyboard, we use a piece of software that pretends to be a serial terminal by emulating it. By Jason Scott (Flickr: IMG_9976), via Wikimedia Commonsīut it’s big and heavy, and these days we have more modern computers, right?

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