Flow control between ESP32 and RS323 device

Question

I'm trying to communicate an RS232 device with an ESP32 (Heltec Wifi/LoRa 32 v2) my problem is that I don't receive any response from the device, doing some research, I'm thinking that the trouble can be the flow control because I don't use these pins and the modules I've used neither have these pins. Do you know a way to, at least, solder the DB9 pins to have a sort of flow control to communicate the devices?

• StarCat: What kind of device are you trying to communicate with?
• StarCat: Also: do you use a TTL->RS232 converter?
• orithena: This can only be answered by looking at the data sheet of "the RS232 device". You can emulate RTS/CTS flow control by connecting them to two unused GPIO pins and then taking care of them in your own code while sending data back and forth. Also, a real RS232 interface communicates on signal levels between 3 and 15V, so if you are not absolutely sure that "the RS232 device" answers on a signal level of less than 3.6V, you will absolutely need a level shifter. Better use a dedicated RS232 shield for that -- which is the only answer I can give from the information in the question.

Answer 1

You could use ESP-IDF calls to setup your UART correctly for hardware serial communication on pin 4 and 5 (and perhaps also other pins).

In the sample below, you just have to:

• assign UART_CLIENT_RTS and UART_CLIENT_CTS to the pins of your need
• change uart_config_t to whichever parameters are relevant for your RS232 device
• set flow_ctrl to UART_HW_FLOWCTRL_RTS, UART_HW_FLOWCTRL_CTS, UART_HW_FLOWCTRL_CTS_RTS or UART_HW_FLOWCTRL_MAX

 #define BUFFER_SIZE 1024
 #define UART_CLIENT_TXD (GPIO_NUM_4)
 #define UART_CLIENT_RXD (GPIO_NUM_5)
 #define UART_CLIENT_RTS (GPIO_NUM_?) // Set this
 #define UART_CLIENT_CTS (GPIO_NUM_?) // Set this
 
 uart_port_t uartNum = UART_NUM_1;
 uart_config_t uart_config = { // Set this
 .baud_rate = 115200,
 .data_bits = UART_DATA_8_BITS,
 .parity = UART_PARITY_DISABLE,
 .stop_bits = UART_STOP_BITS_1,
 .flow_ctrl = UART_HW_FLOWCTRL_CTS_RTS
 };
 
 uart_param_config(uartNum, &uart_config);
 uart_set_pin(uartNum, UART_CLIENT_TXD, UART_CLIENT_RXD, UART_CLIENT_RTS, UART_CLIENT_CTS);
 uart_driver_install(uartNum, BUFFER_SIZE * 2, 0, 0, NULL, 0);

Communication can be done with the various uart_write_* and uart_read_* methods as defined in the documentation.