Serial or shell w/ script to stndout?

I'm workin with a serial bluetooth device that I'm having limited
sucess with using max's serial object. I can get it to listen to Max but the data returned thru bluetooth is intermittant.Does the serial object translate asci to regular values or do I have to use
another object? (The data coming thru is mixed and formatted , ie X=$$$ Y=$$$ Z=$$$ -text and integers. I have the option to get the device to dump binary values but this seems tough translation for MAX.)

I can get everything to work wonderfully in a terminal shell in
osx. Anyway to forgo the serial object and use the shell object to
pipe this data from the terminal shell into Max?
maybe with a script? The serial object seems alittle picky.

My other option is the object hi. Use hi with a bluetooth dongle,
althought it's unclear to me if hi can send commands out as well as
bring data in....... Anyone have any thoughts?

Thanks very much. -Teflon