Serial Port Splitter Help
Serial Port Splitter HelpSerial Port Splitter allows you to share one serial port among several applications.
Moreover, this functionality can be easily integrated into your software.
As soon as the necessity to work from several applications with a device connected to COM port arises, you face problems.
The point is that the operating system allows to access COM port to only one application simultaneously.
Question: So, how to access the same COM port from several applications simultaneously?
Answer: There is no standard way of doing this!
However, we are able to overcome this limitation of the operating system.
As a result we have created a powerful application Serial Port Splitter that allows you to get access to a device connected to a COM port from several applications simultaneously.
Serial Port Splitter creates virtual COM ports that are the exact copies of the specified physical COM port. Now, any program can work with its own virtual COM port not hindering other programs.
Data written to physical COM port get to all the virtual COM ports. And vice versa, the data written to virtual COM ports gets to the physical one.
Bob took his GPS-receiver connected to the laptop and went to the countryside by car. He wants to track his own location on the map and writes his route for further examination. At the same time Bob wants to see 3D model of place where he is at present.
Unfortunately Bob does not have the multifunctional program, which would solve all his tasks. That's why he uses three different programs.
Using Serial Port Splitter he splits physical COM port to which GPS-receiver is plugged into three virtual COM ports. Then he configures each application to use its own virtual COM port.
Now all three programs retrieve data from one GPS-receiver simultaneously and everything works fine like never before.
There are 3 things Serial Port Splitter can do: splitting, sharing, joining.
This feature allows to create virtual COM ports that are the exact copies of specified physical COM ports. All the data written to physical COM port get to all virtual COM ports. Data written to a virtual COM port get to physical COM port.
In such a way, by means of virtual COM ports, several applications can exchange data simultaneously with the same device connected to a physical COM port.
At the same time, there is a possibility to configure ports access permissions, COM ports settings and so on.
Question: Is it possible to work with the same COM port without splitting it to several different virtual COM ports?
Answer: It is possible! There is a Share feature that is intended to accomplish it. Any physical COM port, being shared, can be opened by several applications simultaneously.
From time to time it is necessary to write the same data to several physical COM port from one application. This task can be accomplished using Join feature. The program creates virtual COM port and forwards serial data from it to several physical COM ports.
Read Usage Examples.
Sometimes it is necessary to limit access to a COM port for several applications (e.g. some programs are to only read data from the COM port and some programs need full access to the COM port). Serial Port Splitter supports such mechanism.
Serial Port Splitter functionality can be easily integrated into your application. So you can create and configure virtual serial ports from your application directly.
Serial Port Splitter is used by GPS devices users, allowing to get data from one GPS-receiver by several applications simultaneously.
Serial software developers use Serial Port Splitter as well. It allows to speed up the development process during debugging and data-logging period.
Serial Port Splitter allows IT integrators to create solutions that seemed impossible earlier.
| General |
|---|
| Allows to split physical COM port to several virtual COM ports |
| Allows to share physical COM port among several applications |
| Allows to join several physical COM ports to one virtual COM port |
| Read/write permissions for COM ports |
| Signal control COM port for serial signals handling |
| Fixed serial settings for COM ports |
| Full hardware serial ports emulation |
| Virtual serial ports look and work like real hardware ports |
| Unlimited number of virtual COM ports can be created |
| Once created virtual ports are operable at each system startup (prior to user login) |
| Overlapped virtual COM ports support (virtual serial ports can have the same names as existing physical COM ports) |
| Compatibility |
| Full Microsoft serial.sys compatibility |
| PnP and WMI technologies compatibility |
| Hyper-Threading Technology compatibility |
| VMware compatibility |
| User Interface and API |
| User-friendly program interface |
| Hot virtual COM port creation. No reboot is required. |
| Virtual serial ports are controlled directly from your own application using command-line |
| Virtual serial ports are controlled directly from your own application using Dynamic Link Library (OEM license) |
| Virtual serial ports are controlled directly from your own application using ActiveX control (OEM license) |