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I'm dealing with some legacy systems that are using RS232 to communicate with peripherals. I'm not very experienced with COM interfacing. I have some code that can open and use COM ports, but it can't open ports that are used by other applications. I need to black box the packets so that we can use the same protocol for updated communications.
Is there any way to "middle man" incoming packets to an open COM port and detect what packets are being sent? I'm using .NET, but I'm open to any type of solution.
(I found this out there, but I don't think this will work for me.)
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Ping the serial device. Connect the serial device directly to the computer and ping the device. Connect to the web interface (if there is one) or connect using the included software.
Checking which application is using a port: Open the command prompt - start >> run >> cmd or start >> All Programs >> Accessories >> Command Prompt. Type netstat -aon | findstr '[port_number]' . Replace the [port_number] with the actual port number that you want to check and hit enter.
I've used com0com - it's great for setting up virtual com ports - which doesn't help you at all.
The COM port interface is basically a 'file read'. My application throws an exception when I try to connect to a COM port that already has another instance reading from it. I'm not sure if you could try opening it as a 'read only' instead of read-write, but it's worth a try.
You should be able to write a virtual com port that can fork off your data to a log file. Com0com is open-source, so you could use that as a starting point.
Another possible solution could be to pick up an rs232 splitter cable forks the serial signal to another serial port.
Or yet another possibility is a Serial Sniffer program (or an open source sniffer).
Or try the hub4com app from the same com0com website!
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