RS-232 control for Advance Energy Pinnacle power supply
Yes!

First:  The supply must be capable of AEBus communication.  You can find out if this is the case via the debug menu from the front panel (if your supply has one), by opening up hyperterminal and trying to communicate with it, or, easiest of all, calling AE and giving them the serial number.  NOTE:  The presence of a serial port on the back of the device does not necessarily mean that it is capable of serial communication!

Second:  Even if the supply is AEBus capable, it may not be able to be set to every mode that one would be able to set from the front panel.  In my experience, the most significant example is:  If your supply has a DeviceNet port, it will be impossible to set the supply into voltage regulation mode while controlling it with the serial port.  In other words, if you have a DeviceNet supply and you want to control it via RS-232 for a voltage-controlled process, you're out of luck.  AE has confirmed that no DeviceNet enabled supplies support anything other than power-regulation while in host (i.e., RS-232) control mode.  Even though you can set it into this regulation mode while in local control.

Third:  There are several different flavors of serial connector that may be present on the back of the supply.  There's the so-called "standard serial port" which uses an RJ-11 type connector and (possibly present) AEBus ports which may be DB-9 or DB-25.  As far as I can tell, the only difference in communicating via the "standard" port versus the AEBus ports is the baud rate.  The standard port communicates at 19.2 kbaud whereas the AEBus ports communicate at 9200 baud.  The structure of the commands is identical.

On a final, semi-related note:  If you do have a DeviceNet supply and wish to not use it, you don't have to supply it with 24V just to avoid an error.  Open the supply up and remove the card.  You then have to switch a jumper (which would otherwise be jumpered on the exterior part of the DeviceNet card), whose identifier depends on the model of your supply.  Call AE and they'll tell you what its label is.  Problem solved! (Unless you also want to use voltage regulation via RS-232!)