Calculating Serial Baud Rate from Measured Value

[sparkie]

Homework Statement

The problem is to calculate the baud rate of a serial transmission by measuring the length of time required to send the ASCII character 'Z' over a serial port. The serial port settings are 9600 baud with a start and stop bit, no parity and a data size of 8 bits.

Homework Equations

We were given no equation.

The Attempt at a Solution

My measured time to send the 8 bit ASCII character 'Z' was 937.5 microseconds. This is 9.375 x 10^-4 seconds. I took this time, and divided it by the 10 bits we sent over the port to get the amount of time required to send a single bit. Now I'm not really sure how I should get the number of its per second. I multiplied by 9600 bits to get 0.9, which is the length of time required to send 9600 bits at the rate of one bit every 93.75 microseconds, but I'm not sure where to go from here.

 

[collinsmark]

For what it's worth, assuming a continuous stream of bits, the "time per bit" and "bit rate" are inverses of each other.
\mathrm{bit \ rate \ (bits/second)} = \frac{1}{ \mathrm{time \ per \ bit \ (seconds/bit)}}