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How to connect MSP430 to a PC serial port for UART communication?

user3475839
Prodigy 110 points
Other Parts Discussed in Thread: MSP430FR5969, MAX232, MAX3221

I've got a custom board with an MSP430FR5969 connected to a MAX3221EIPWR RS232 transceiver on the eUSCI_A0 UART pins (P2.0 and P2.1). I'm using the "msp430fr59xx_euscia0_uart_01" example program to test with. The output of the transceiver is hooked up to the serial port of my PC, running Windows 7.

The next step is getting the PC to recognize the serial port, which is where I'm stuck. The PC doesn't notice when I plug in the cable from the PC serial port to the transceiver output. I went to Device Manager and scanned for hardware changes, at which point the PC did notice that something was attached to the serial port, and tried to install drivers, but failed. It's now showing a "PCI Serial Port" under Other Devices, but it's got the yellow warning triangle on it's icon, and it doesn't show up as a selectable port in RealTerm.


I've looked around for drivers for this on the internet, but found nothing so far. Is that what I need? Am I missing a step?

In the big picture here, I'm trying to get a program to send a chunk of data from the MSP to a PC, and I could use advice about how to format said data to make it usable (e.g. saved to a .csv) once it gets there. Is there a way other than UART to Serial that would make this easier?

  • 0
    Guru 90360 points

    With a "traditional" RS-232 port (on a PCI card, e.g.) the PC doesn't really care whether anything is plugged into the port or not -- only the application cares when it starts using it.Thus it really makes no difference whether it's talking to a MAX3221 or a MAX232 -- or nothing at all, as far as that goes.

    Windows should configure the port the first time it powers up with the card installed (connected or not). If you've got a yellow triangle, there may have been a conflict during configuration; I think the "Advanced Options" (or somesuch) button in Device Manager will tell you about this.

    If you've just installed the port (on a PCI card, e.g.) you might need to check with the card manufacturer's (not TI's) Web site for drivers. I don't recall having had to do that in, oh, 20 years or so, since every add-in serial port I had just used the Windows drivers.

    Since almost none of the machines I work with has an actual RS-232 port, I use USB Virtual COM Ports pretty much exclusively. (Unlike physical RS-232 ports, these do come and go when you connect/disconnect them.) When faced with an actual RS-232 port, I use one of those USB-to-RS-232 cables with the conversion chip built into one of the connectors; I suppose (?) they still make those (try Amazon). Otherwise I use an FT232 or similar (logic-level, not RS-232) USB-to-serial converter.

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