It is not necessary to use USB with a Duet board for normal operation however there are a number of troubleshooting instructions that require connecting to the Duet over USB (normally when connecting over the network is not working for some reason).

There are many terminal emulators available for windows, the simplest and most reliable we have found is Yet Another Terminal (YAT). You can install it from here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/y-a-ter...

With its standard setup the line endings are not set correctly for Duet. This page shows how to set the line endings correctly.

There are different standards for how to end a line - see Wikipedia for more information. Setting them wrong in a terminal emulation program leads to a long single line (which may be too long for the terminal):

Setting them right gets the response you would expect:

The Duet uses <LF> for line endings (Unix like). To set them in YAT go to Terminal in the top menu bar then Settings:

Then select Text Settings and change the EOL sequence selection to <LF>

Unless you have other serial devices connected to your machine, other than the Duet, there will probably only be one COM port available for selection in YAT:

Select the available port under Serial Port, the defaults for Bits per second etc should work.

Then click the green tick to connect (or Terminal menu then Open/Start).

If the COM post is not available that is outside the scope of these instructions, check your USB connections, try a different cable and port, see:

Installing and Updating Firmware - Fallback procedure Num 2