Is RS-232 obsolete, or showing up in new products, or what? It dropped off PCs years ago, but maybe it’s still in one sector or another?

It was massively useful, in its day. Besides all the mice and printers and instrumentation, I used to wire output pins (RTS and DTR, I think, but I’d have to look it up anymore) to prototype boards to control things, even using DOS Debug to flip the pins when I was in a hurry.

So—any sightings of our old buddy in the wild?

I’ve got an Arduino setup with a max3232 allowing me to send and receive serial commands between my arduino and old AV equipment I have.

At the moment I send with the arduino and then essentially ‘listen’ in a loop for a response. My question is ‘what is best practice for doing this?’. I want to maximise the chance of the AV equipment ‘seeing’ the command come through, and then want to maximise the chance of my arduino ‘hearing’ the response and capturing it.

As I understand it, there’s no acknowledgements that happen in the communication in either direction, and the arduino can’t listen and speak at the same time. So what’s the best practice to minimise the chance of the arduino picking up a response?

Thanks!