I recently developed a Visual Studio .NET application that uses an OpenSDA virtual serial port to communicate with a FRDM-K64F. My serial protocol is a binary command-response protocol, which means that every time the .NET application sends a command packet to the serial port, it should always receive a response packet back. You can find more details about the protocol in the Freescale Intelligent Sensing Framework, but for the purposes of this document, all that matters is that every command should receive a response.
My Visual Studio .NET application uses the SerialPort class, and worked beautifully...until I changed the OpenSDA firmware. Originally I used OpenSDA firmware from P&E; this time I had tried out Segger. In theory, this change should not have made a difference, however with the Segger firmware my .NET application never received response packets. I knew that the command packets were transmitting correctly from PC to board because they would turn a board LED on and off as expected. I tried using a binary terminal, RealTerm, to send commands to see if it would receive responses, and it did. So the problem had to be in my .NET application. After a lot of googling and some trial-and-error, I ultimately found that enabling the Data Terminal Ready (DTR) signal did the trick. Strangely, I didn't need to enable DTR in RealTerm.
The moral of the story is that if you want to use Segger OpenSDA with a .NET SerialPort, then you must enable DTR. Fortunately this configuration also works with P&E and mbed OpenSDA.
