A USB port is one of the most common ways to connect modern peripheral devices to a computer. Another widely used method is a serial interface or serial port. And while today COM-based connections are becoming less popular among users of consumer-grade computers, communications of specialized industrial equipment are still based on the serial interface.
To establish wireless connections between advanced USB and serial devices, specialists use professional software solutions. Dedicated programs allow connecting to USB and COM ports over the network so that developers can easily test and optimize their hardware solutions. The same can be applied to working with serial apps.
Since the two serial programs reside on the same computer, there must be a way to connect them using the computer's internal memory rather than physical communications interfaces embedded in the computer. That's where dedicated port virtualization software comes into play.
Electronic Team, Inc. is a global software development company specializing in USB and serial port communication solutions. For over 15 years of successful software development, the company has delivered a wide range of professional USB and serial port utilities working on all major platforms (including Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android) over any distance. Here are some of the most popular Electronic's Team USB and serial port communication software:
1. Serial Port Monitor
2. Virtual Serial Port Driver
3. Serial to Ethernet Connector
4. USB to Ethernet Connector
Serial Port Monitor
Serial Port Monitor is a professional utility designed to help sniff and analyze serial port data. The software allows reading, displaying, and logging the activity of all RS232, RS422, and RS485 ports available in a system at a time. COM Port Analyzer provides users with a very straightforward way to monitor serial port communications in real time, which makes it possible to identify and resolve problems that may occur when developing serial apps or drivers straight away.
Key capabilities of Serial Port Analyzer:
- Connecting and starting sniffing COM ports already used by any other application;
- displaying captured data in four different viewing modes (table, line, dump, and terminal);
- emulation of sending serial data to the monitored device in various formats (string, binary, octal, decimal, hexadecimal, mixed);
- working with Modbus RTU and Modbus ASCII protocols;
- automatic display of differences between several monitoring sessions, and more.
Virtual Serial Port Driver
Virtual Serial Port Driver comes in handy when there's a need to emulate null-modem connection between virtual serial interfaces. The program creates pairs of virtual serial ports connected with a virtual null-modem cable. Should your system lack physical COM ports, this efficient null modem emulator will create as many virtual serial port pairs as you need. What’s important is that all newly-created virtual interfaces will completely emulate the behavior and settings of real serial ports, so the system can easily recognize them.
The advanced features of Virtual Null Modem Emulator include:
- The ability to create an unlimited number of virtual serial port pairs;
- support for advanced Windows kernel driver technology, which ensures WDM, WMI, Power Management, and PnP support.
- emulation and support for all standard signal lines (DTR/DSR, RTS/CTS, RING, ERROR, DCD, etc.) as well as HandFlow control (Hardware and Xon/Xoff);
- fast connections between virtual serial ports (about 5.5 Mbytes/sec);
- The ability to delete ports even if they are currently opened by another app.
Serial to Ethernet Connector
Powerful and easy to use, Serial to Ethernet Converter is probably the most efficient software solution for remote access to serial ports. The main idea with this Serial to IP Converter is that you establish reliable connections to any number remote COM interfaces over the network and get the ability to manage serial devices attached to these ports. The software is the simplest way to share serial port in virtual machine and access any local peripherals from your guest OS.
Here’s what you can achieve with Serial to Ethernet Connector:
- Sharing any number of serial ports and devices with other network users over TCP/IP;
- connecting to a remote computer over TCP/IP Telnet protocol, with the RFC 2217 Telnet extensions for COM Port Control;
- full compatibility with HyperThreaded and multi-processor systems;
- separated traffic statistics for serial ports, each of the TCP connections, UDP packets;
- sending and receiving RAW data; and more.
USB to Ethernet Connector
If you need to share USB over Ethernet, WiFi, the internet or any other network, USB to Ethernet Connector is the simplest way. The software can redirect virtually any USB device over the network so that you can access it from any distant location. The cross-platform solution allows users to USB passthrough device to a virtual machine and a blade server. In addition, with the software you get the ability to work with any local USB peripherals within RDP session.
Here's what USB over Ethernet Connector offers:
- Full support for Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems;
- convenient traffic compression option;
- embedded traffic encryption which ensures high security of connections;
- USB device isolation in a multi-user environment of terminal servers;
- Support for VMware, VMware ESX, Citrix XenDesktop and Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization software.
As you see, the high-quality software solutions provided by Electronic Team support a broad spectrum of advanced network technologies. The solutions will be a good choice for programmers and IT specialists that deal with USB and serial communication software and hardware.