RS232 Communication

Requirements: A straight through RS232 DB9 cable or a RS232 DB9 to USB cable.

The following section explains how to send the commands to the pump. Chemyx provides a driver in LabVIEW that is written to send and parse the responses. Chemyx also provides examples in Matlab to communicate correctly with the pumps. If you want to write your own software or use any RS232 terminal program, the following sections will be helpful.

RS232 COM Port Settings

  • Bits per Seconds (Baud Rate): 9600 or 38400, set in the pump setting menu.
  • Parity None
  • Stop Bit 1
  • Flow Control None

RS232 Command Notes

  • Commands are capable of multiple or single step can end with a comma.
  • Letter case matters. Commands are lowercase.
  • A “\r” or “\r\n” can be added to the end of the command, though the command is valid without it. “\n” alone is not valid.
  • For multi-step commands, space or no space between each step is valid. The response will return in the format you used.
  • Most commands return the set value. This can be used to check to see if the command value was set correctly. Most likely if the value in the command is not the same as the value in the response, the command value was outside of the limits of that parameter. For example, the rate of the syringe pump is based on the pump. To see the range available for limit send the command read limit parameter.
  • The following command will set the number of steps in multi-step mode: volume and time.
  • If the number of values in the following commands is less than the number of steps in multi-step mode, the remaining steps will gain the same value as the last entered value. Any extra values beyond the number of steps will be truncated. The commands are: rate and delay.

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