Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Virtual Serial Port

How did I start to play around with it? It all began when a friend of mine was asking me for a favour to help him develop a simple software to communicate to another software thru serial port. My laptop doesn't have a serial port (of course, unless it was a very very old laptop) and I only have one usb to serial converter.

My first idea is to buy another usb to serial converter and a null modem cable to connect 2 laptops, thereby I can test the serial communication. Another idea is to use my old desktop (I have one and lent it to someone and actually forgot about it until I need it) but I don't think it is easy to do.
Then today at the office, asking my friend and he gave me one brilliant solution called VIRTUAL SERIAL PORT. I never heard it until today and my oh my... it is the solution to my problem (Thanks Adhi).

Googling around and I found one free driver (http://com0com.sourceforge.net/). Easy to install and I think I don't need to setup anything more, unless I need to configure another serial port pair. One thing lacking is the GUI to configure the ports. Anyway, it's free and open source, I couldn't be happier.

1 comment:

Olga Ritchie said...

Cool post! Anyway there is a program which creates virtual serial ports and connects them with virtual null modem cables. It's not free but still effective. http://www.virtual-serial-port.com