In the world of printers, particularly the POS ones, there are two common approaches, OPOS and Windows print queues. And there's also the work-around like the virtual serial port. But there seems to be another approach out there too ... the driver is installed but the software seems to be writing directly to the port rather than using the windows spooler.
If you look at the spooler ports when an Epson USB printer is installed for example, there is a ESDPRT001 ... could it be that the POS app is writing to the port directly and bypassing the whole spooler?
According to Epson's product description of OmniLink no driver is required. It is quite possible that the spooler has been outsourced to the powerful onboard computer, which is operating at ~400Mhz. Just a guess.
You don't need a driver for Epson's OmniLink. If your spoolsv.exe isn't working, look into this though.
Related
Is it possible to connect the HC-08 UART bluetooth module to computers? (PCs with bluetooth dongles, laptops). Does the OS matter? I have both Windows 10 and Ubuntu 20.04 machines to test with. I can successfully connect my Samsung Galaxy A5 with the bluetooth module but I haven't done so with computers.
The short answer is yes.
The longer answer is that it appears the HC-08 supports the Serial Port Profile (SPP) and it is user configurable as to if it takes the client or server role. Typically you would have the HC-08 in the server role.
You need to have the SPP client running on your PC (Linux or Windows). As this is a site about getting programming help, I'll assume you want to end up accessing them with code. This is likely to look different depending which operating system and programming language you are using. Searching he internet for " bluetooth spp client" should turn something up
Examples of how to do this on Linux with Python:
http://blog.kevindoran.co/bluetooth-programming-with-python-3/
https://bluedot.readthedocs.io/en/latest/btcommapi.html#bluetoothclient
These two examples take slightly different approaches to achieve the same thing. Pick whichever one feels more natural to you.
I have an Arduino application talking over USB to an application on Windows 8 using the MAVLINK protocol. The connection appears as COM3.
Is there a Windows application that can spy on this connection and display the traffic going in both directions? Raw bytes are fine, I don't need the protocol decoded.
You could log serial port activity using Portmon. (Edit: You need to first connect to the local computer via the Computer menu, and you must start capture on the port before a program opens it.)
You may not want to log USB traffic. Such a log would include a lot of extra information relating to the USB to serial adapter which is providing COM3. Portmon would only give you the bytes transferred over COM3, and the Mavlink protocol is entirely contained within that data stream. If you're sure you want to log all USB traffic to and from that device, then I recommend SnoopyPro. In Windows 7, you need to run it as administrator.
If you can use Windows XP in your environment, USB sniff should work for you. If you need something more powerful (and are willing to pay a fee for it) then USBLyzer might be a viable option.
The answer is SnoopyPro, and you can download it at:
SnoopyPro Sourceforge
This tool allows you to get USB information and also USB communication data. I used it in the past to know how a USB device worked in order to do its driver on Linux. I used this tool as a sniffer.
Basically, SnoopyPro allows you to intercept, display, record and analyze the USB protocol and all transferred data between any USB device connected to your PC and applications. It can be successfully used in application development, USB device driver or hardware development and offers the powerful platform for effective coding, testing and optimization.
I have developed a USB device that communicates with linux over a simple but proprietary interface and some custom Linux drivers. My goal is to port this to Windows without writing windows drivers. What I would like to do is find an open source or inbuilt class driver for windows that would look like a COM port in Windows. Then I would tailor the embedded software to match what ever protocol and descriptors the virtual COM port expects to see.
The idea would be that I could plug my device in to a Windows machine and a relatively high speed COM port would appear with out me having to develop Windows drivers for it.
I have been looking at the USB CDC (Communications Device Class) documentation and it looks promising, but I don't know which sub interface would be best to use so that it would show up as a COM port.
Has anyone here done any work like this before or could provide some insight?
Specifically:
Are there virtual COM drivers "built in" to windows or would I need a 3rd party driver.
Which CDC sub class should I use for simple RS232 emulation (No need for modem AT commands, etc)
Is there a better option to do what I am trying to do.
Thanks
There is a USB-to-serial driver built in to Windows that will do what you want. It is called usbser.sys:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/837637
You will have to write an INF file and distribute that to your users, but that will not be too hard because it is only a few kilobytes of text and you can find examples online.
I'm not aware of any great documentation for this driver by Microsoft, so my advice would be to find some other device that uses it, such as Pololu Wixel, and copy what they did.
Here are the device descriptors we used and the special control tranfers we had to implement:
https://github.com/pololu/wixel-sdk/blob/master/libraries/src/usb_cdc_acm/usb_cdc_acm.c
You can see our INF file, wixel_serial.inf, by downloading the software and looking in the drivers folder:
http://www.pololu.com/docs/0J46/3.a
(There are other files in there that are not necessary for you.)
You can also look at the Arduino Uno because they use the same driver.
Whatever you do, please don't use our USB Vendor ID in your product! You need to get your own.
Update: In Windows 10, you don't need an INF file anymore because of the new usbser.inf driver that comes with Windows.
If you are using a UART you can easily interface it to a FTDI USB chip like http://www.ftdichip.com/Products/ICs/FT232R.htm or a Prolific like http://www.prolific.com.tw/eng/products.asp?id=59
For development, prototype and testing I have half dozen of these laying around http://www.pololu.com/catalog/product/391
I connect it directly to the UART pins on AVR and 8051 micros.
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?
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.
I know this is an old post, but in case someone else happens upon this question, one good option is Virtual Serial Port Emulator (VSPE) from Eterlogic
It provides an API for creating kernel mode virtual comport devices, i.e. connectors, mappers, splitters etc.
However, some of the advertised capabilities were really not capabilities at all.
EDIT
A much better choice, Eltima. This product is fully baked. Good developer tech support. The product did all it claimed to do. Product options include both desktop applications, as well as software development kits with APIs.
Neither of these products are open source, or free. However, as other posts here have pointed out, there are other options. Here is a list of various serial utilities:
com0com (current)
com0com - With Signed Driver (old version)
Yet another place for com0com with Signed Driver (Pete's Blog)
Tactical Software
Termite
COM Port Serial Emulator
Kermit (obsolete, but still downloadable)
HWVSP3
HHD Software (free edition)
I use com0com - With Signed Driver, on windows 7 x64 to emulate COM3 AND COM4 as a pair.
Then i use COM Dataport Emulator to recieve from COM4.
Then i open COM3 with the app im developping (c#) and send data to COM3.
The data sent thru COM3 is received by COM4 and shown by 'COM Dataport Emulator' who can also send back a response (not automated).
So with this 2 great programs i managed to emulate Serial RS-232 comunication.
Hope it helps.
Both programs are free!!!!!
There's always the hardware route. Purchase two USB to serial converters, and connect them via a NULL modem.
Pro tips:
1) Windows may assign new COM ports to the adapters after every device sleep or reboot.
2) The market leaders in chips for USB to serial are Prolific and FTDI. Both companies are battling knockoffs, and may be blocked in future official Windows drivers. The Linux drivers however work fine with the clones.
Another alternative, even though the OP did not ask for it:
There exist usb-to-serial adapters.
Depending on the type of adapter, you may also need a nullmodem cable, too.
They are extremely easy to use under linux, work under windows, too, if you have got working drivers installed.
That way you can work directly with the sensors, and you do not have to try and emulate data.
That way you are maybe even save from building an anemic system.
(Due to your emulated data inputs not covering all cases, leading you to a brittle system.)
Its often better to work with the real stuff.
i used eltima make virtual serial port for my modbus application debug work. it is really very good application at development stage to check serial port program without connecting hardware.
From time to time, I need to dump USB traffic under Windows, mostly to support hardware under Linux, so my primary goal is to produce dump files for protocol analysis.
For USB traffic, it seems that SniffUsb is the clear winner... It works under Windows XP (but not later) and has a much nicer GUI than earlier versions. It produces huge dump files, but everything is there.
However, my device is in fact a USB serial device, so I turned to Portmon which can sniff serial port traffic without the USB overhead.
After five years waiting, now it's possible to sniff usb packets on windows
See http://desowin.org/usbpcap/tour.html for a quick tour. It works pretty well
Since people don't seem to realize it, Wireshark does monitor USB traffic and has a parser for it; but the catch is it only works under Linux. Wireshark on Windows will not do this.
It may be possible to plug the USB device you want to monitor, along with a Linux machine (with Wireshark running) and your Windows machine and just use the USB device under Windows.
Problem with the above? I don't know how the Linux machine or the Windows machine will detect each other.
Busdog, an open source project hosted on github, has worked well for me. It has a driver it installs to allow it to monitor USB communications. The config window allows you to reinstall or remove the device at any time.
You can select the USB device you want from an enumerated list. A nice feature is to have it automatically trace a new device that is plugged in:
Data communications to and from an SWR analyzer I was reverse engineering were captured flawlessly:
USBSnoop works too - and is free.
Or, you could buy a USB to Ethernet converter and use whatever network sniffer you prefer to see the data.
Personally, I'd use QEMU or KVM and instrument their USB passthrough code, and then use libusb to prototype the replacement driver in user space (this latter bit I've done before; writing USB device drivers in Python is fun!).
Microsoft Message Analyzer was able to capture USB traffic, with Device and Log File parser from MS: link
Update: as mentioned by #facetus, MS Message Analyzer has been retired on November 25 2019.