Serial port monitoring

Cedric — Thu, 28 May 2009 00:00:09 +0000

In engineering, when working with embedded devices, it is often required to be able to read data from the serial ports. In most cases, to simplify the coding process, whatever device that is throwing data is usually just dumping data without any form of hand shake. This leads to your computer not knowing there is data coming from a certain COM port unless you specifically tell it to read from that port.

Reading data can quickly become an issue. You could write your own little tool to read data off a certain port but there is a tool out there that make’s it much easier. Needing a tool that does exactly that for work, I spent a while on the internet looking for free (as in beer) software without any luck, so I moved to trial based commercial software and found one very good application.

It’s made by Eltima Software and is called Serial port monitor 4.0 (how original). The application let’s you do much more than what I needed but the features I used are:
Monitoring specific COM port and specifying it’s parameter (baud rate, databits, etc.)
Seeing the data results in a table format
Seeing the control data exchange

The tool performed very well in my environment and for the type of work I was doing. For my buying the software would not be an option since I only needed it for a few days but for it’s price, it might be a good buy if you need to do a lot of data monitoring.

Talk Computer » port reading

Serial port monitoring