Most of the time RS-232 and UART come together in serial communication theories. Are they both the same? From my readings I concluded UART is a hardware form of the RS-232 protocol. Am I correct?
All the mouse movements, USB connections and other PC peripherals such as printers etc. are what is called serial communication. One bit per time. So far so good. But when it comes to TCP protocol,
Can we calculate the baud rate or communication speed of RS232 communication from the X output signal? The below image is from an RS232 communication output signal. I took this picture with 0xaa, ...
I suggest you look into getting a direct serial connection - you can get serial port cards for PCs and laptops (also note that most Panasonic toughbooks still have serial ports as standard). This will get away from any buffering issues in the USB-serial interface. Windows 7 has good enough realtime capability so you probably don't need to move off that.
RS232 "standard" is so slippery that you can always find gender-benders (M-M, F-F), wired with- or without Xmit/Recv crossover (there's a handful of 'em in my parts box for just this reason!). I can't tell the gender of the port in your equipment diagram, but if it and the shield are the same, you'll probably need a gender-bender with crossover.
I have determined from the image above, which is all that is available in the manual, that I need a RS232 to USB converter (null modem) that works at 12 Volts, but I haven't been able to find any, or there is a lot of confusion regarding this converters.
The IMU has an RS232 connector that just uses the pins VCC, GND, TX, RX, nothing else. The SDK comes with it has a custom RS232-USB adapter that uses the FT232R and MAX3160, but apart from that it doesn't seem to do anything special.
What is the difference between RS232 and Serial? What are the core differences between all of these communication methods: reliability, cost, application, speed, hardware requirements? If you can imagine, I have all of these terms written on cards, scattered on the coffee table, and I need someone to just help me organize my understanding.
