How to use the IR829/809 Mini-USB Console Cable with Windows 10

The blue mini-USB console cable that is included with the IR829 (and other 800 series devices) connects the mini-USB console port, under the screwed down plate, to a USB port on your PC. The two main aspects to think about when using Windows as a client for a console connection via the mini-USB cable are determining which COM port to connect to, and which terminal emulation software to use. 

Windows used to be shipped with HyperTerminal, so many people are accustomed to using that as a console client. HyperTerminal is licenced software ($65), so that may not be what you want. A free alternative, and arguably simpler to use, is PuTTY, which shall be described below. 

Either tool, and others like them, will connect to a COM port. The trick is knowing which. In Windows 10, before you insert the USB console cable, you can open the "Device Manager" to see the available COM ports (type "Device Manager" into the Cortana field). The Device Manager will display a tree of devices on your PC. Open "Ports (COM & LPT)" and you may see some ports already (what you will see depends on your PC's configuration). Then, plug in the USB console cable and additional ports will appear. It could be COM4 and COM5, specifically "Silicon Labs Dual CP210x USB to UART Bridge: Standard COM Port (COM4)", and the same for COM5. 

One of those ports, COM4 or COM5 or whichever appears for you, will work for serial connection purposes with PuTTY, or other terminal emulators. 

You can run PuTTY by typing "Putty" in Cortana, and then selecting the "PuTTY Desktop app" icon that should appear. The PuTTY Configuration  window will appear, defaulting to "SSH" settings. Select the "Serial" radio button and the fields will change to show a "Serial line" field and a "Speed" field. The Serial line field will have a default value, typically, of "COM1". You will need to change that to one of the COM ports that appeared when you were looking at the Device Manager as described above, e.g. COM4. The Speed value should stay at the default of 9600. 

After changing the Serial line value, press return and a console window should appear with a prompt. If there is no prompt, try again with a different COM port value, COM5 say. 

It is possible that the drivers required to make this work are not present in your copy of Windows. In which case you may need to install them. The drivers here may work for you: Cisco Systems 

Also see How to use the IR829/809 Mini-USB Console Cable with OSX El Capitan 10.11, The specified item was not found. and How to use the IR829 Mini-USB Console Cable with Linux. 

We are trying to configure a new IR809 via console using putty. We've installed the appropriate drivers and the device is recognised on the COM6 and the COM7 port. The parameters that we have used are: Baud Rate - 9600, Data bits - 8, Parity - none, Stop bits - 1, Flow control - none. We are not able to get a prompt on the putty console. Is there any other way to console into it.

 Had the same issue with PUTTY and then used the SecureCRT and that solved my problem.