Hi Steve,

I respectfully disagree, in this limited context. Once, as a learning exercise, I strongly recommend getting rid of as many automations, bells and whistles if you will, and get as close to the chip and pins as possible. The first time I set up an 8052, I used Hyperterminal and I watched the RS-232 communications (both directions) with an oscilloscope.

How many developers read that autobaud uses an uppercase "U" to calculate the baud rate and never, or only much later, understand why. The first time you see a 01010101 sequence pop up on an oscilloscope screen it becomes immediately and intuitively obvious. You don't need to analyze the autobaud code to see what's going on.

With Hyperterminal, what you see is what goes out and comes back. That's all. No, I don't recommend Hyperterminal for routine use. But as a one-time learning tool, it lets you see the actual bootloader responses without dressing them up in the virtual representations of a windows GUI. For programming, or actual development, that is of no value. For learning, it's of great value.

It's the same as compiling your own executable code and converting it into HEX format yourself. Of course it would be silly, not to mention prohibitively tedious, to do so routinely, but if you want to really understand things in as short a time as possible you should do it at least once. Most developers will eventually notice that only those registers whose address ends with either a 0 or an 8 are bit addressable. If you've ever manually compiled the mneunonic into an executable instruction you also understand why.

Finally, I also think there is real value in using Hyperterminal to "play around" with the various bootloader instructions, just to see them work. FLIP definitely makes it easier to do, but it hides the details of the operations.