I have an update on the PE virtual COM port not working issue.
Yesterday I tried following the instructions for fixing the OSBDM as laid out in Section 8 of the "TWR-K60N512 Quick Start Demo, Lab Guide for MQX 3.7", Rev. 3.
These instructions say that the Tower board "should enumerate as a composite device, with one driver for debugging, and the other as a serial port." These devices are:
1. "PEMicro USB Serial Port (j1)"
2. "Open Source BDM - Debug Port"
These instructions further warn that "if you only see it enumerate as the Open Source BDM Debug Port, then your computer may automatically picking up an outdated driver."
My system had only the Debug Port, and did not have the Serial Port, so I followed the instructions for installing new device drivers. I used the drivers that were on the CD that came with the Tower board.
I had success! The serial port worked! I could type commands into the PE Micro terminal window, and get actual responses from the shell. This was yesterday, June 22, 2011, at approximately 2pm EDT.
Then I made a small change to the Tower Quick Start C code. My change worked fine, but the serial port quit working, and has not worked since, even after backing out my change, rebooting the Tower and my PC, reinstalling drivers, again and again and again, ...
All of the devices enumerate now (they did not before the driver installation adventures) but the serial port STILL DOES NOT WORK. PE Micro Terminal Window application v2.01 says that the port is open (it used to not connect to it at all) but there is never any data transfer anymore. If I put a breakpoint in shell_task (in SDCard_Task.c) on the printf statement inside the endless for ( ; ; ) loop the breakpoint hits, so it would appear that the "Shell" function is continually returning. I do not know enough about CW or MQX yet to figure out what is going on inside of "Shell", but I am learning.
I would much rather be spending my time adding USB Mass Storage Device support to the Tower demo, so that I can see the contents of the SD card from my PC as an additional disk drive, and not trying to fix this problem.
One of you Freescale types, such as Crasycat or Jim Trudeau, needs to respond to this ASAP.