My Senior Design group is designing an autonomous robot, and we want to use the real time serial port located on the CompactRIO chassis. We are also getting the module that contains 4 extra serial ports because we have more serial data applications. We have a laser range finder that has a serial connection that outputs straight ASCII data. We have hooked it up to hyperterminal, and we get exact centimeter distances which is exactly what we were looking for. I was wondering how to connect this to the CompactRIO and read the ASCII data (in centimeters) into a VI. Moreover, what things do we need in our VI to have access to the serial data. Thanks.