Serial and Serial Monitor on Windows

[pine 140]

Just tried my first practical project on Energia, and i love it!

 

I do have a question on Serial and appreciate any advice. It is about the stability of the COM port. The first time my program worked fine, and the serail port monitor returned expected results. But after adding some code (no errors and upload is ok), the following message is displayed when i tried to load the Serial Monitor:

 

Binary sketch size: 1,362 bytes (of a 16,384 byte maximum)
processing.app.SerialException: Serial port 'COM24' already in use. Try quiting any programs that may be using it.

 

And compile and upload again will fail with this message:

 

# Exit: 19
# ERROR 1014: Could not find MSP-FET430UIF on specified COM port

*******************************************************************************************
UseCase for MSP430.dll
...

 

After unplugging and plugging the LP back in, Windows (XP) complained it cannot recognize the board. And after a few tries the PC goes blue screen

 

Rebooted and started fresh with the default AnalogReadSerial sample program where I started the project with, and got hit by similar problem, but no blue screen.

 

Checked the sensor again with Arduino and everything is fine, sensor is working and the COM port is alright.

 

Any suggestions I could try? Reinstalling drivers? I have CCS v5 installed but that shouldn't be any conflict right? Thanks in advance.

[pine 140]

Just back home and tried again and the problem is gone! The pc was turned off before i left, so maybe my pc needed some rest!

 

 

Edit: It came back again! Lost the com port after a few compile and upload, then Windows cannot recognize the LP.. Perhaps it's my old PC

[fluffy 3]

I've also experienced the serial port becoming unavailable (or unusable) after using the Serial Monitor option in Energia on Window 7. Selecting another COM port and then re-selecting the "real" one seems to work so far in my limited experimentation. In other words, your board might be say, COM8, so switch to COM1, then back to COM8 and that may clear things up for the next run.

 

Hope this helps.