Faking an RS232 Serial Port

windows mocking serial-port hardware-interface virtual-serial-port
BefittingTheorem picture BefittingTheorem · Oct 22, 2009 · Viewed 126.5k times · Source

I'm developing a project that has a number of hardware sensors connecting to the deployment machine through RS232 serial ports.

But ... I'm developing on a machine without an physical RS232 serial ports, but I would like to make fake serial ports that I can connect to and output data from with the aim of faking input from hardware sensors.

Does anyone know of a way to create a fake serial port and control it on Windows XP?

Answer

Frank Bollack picture Frank Bollack · Oct 22, 2009

If you are developing for Windows, the com0com project might be, what you are looking for.

It provides pairs of virtual COM ports that are linked via a nullmodem connetion. You can then use your favorite terminal application or whatever you like to send data to one COM port and recieve from the other one.

EDIT:

As Thomas pointed out the project lacks of a signed driver, which is especially problematic on certain Windows version (e.g. Windows 7 x64).

There are a couple of unofficial com0com versions around that do contain a signed driver. One recent verion (3.0.0.0) can be downloaded e.g. from here.

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