Com port connection viewer tool?

dtokez · 4 Aug 2015 at 14:11

Hi all, I do a lot of work with serial devices, and I'm so sick and tired of going through device manager to check what port I want to connect too!

I have searched but not found anything so far, I'm after a tool that simply displays what com ports I have connected on my machine without having to go through device manager - anyone aware of anything?

cheers

mushtafa · 4 Aug 2015 at 14:19

Commenting as also interested.

dtokez · 4 Aug 2015 at 21:47

not looking good so far eh mushtafa

Caged · 5 Aug 2015 at 00:41

Get-WMIObject Win32_SerialPort | Select-Object Name,DeviceID,Description

Is the relevant Powershell command. A bit of Googling will be able to get that appearing in a dialog box.

dtokez · 5 Aug 2015 at 19:06

Sorry mate but I have no idea what a powershell is?

Raumarik · 5 Aug 2015 at 19:28

http://www.com-port-monitoring.com/datalogger.html

I used that in the past (few years ago now mind you) for various stuff

Full features list:
redirect incoming data stream into a text file form any number of serial ports simultaneously
select the file to redirect incoming data to for each port
real-time counter of the received and stored bytes
collect data from the real serial ports as well as from virtual ones
disable/enable logging on-the-fly
append incoming data to already existing file
specify serial port connection parameters (baudrate, parity, stop bits, flow control, databits)
source code is provided (MFC/C++ VC7.1)
works under Virtual Machines

Not sure if they ever made it completely portable for USB sticks etc. I doubt what you're after is available now but the power shell that Caged mentioned is probably the easiest way to do it quickly with a batch file on a USB stick or network share etc.

dtokez · 12 Aug 2015 at 11:32

cheers halfmad. Just grabbed the software and it does display a list of my COM ports so essentially that's what I'm after albeit a little overkill

done some extensive googling and come across this http://todbot.com/blog/2012/03/02/listcomports-windows-command-line-tool-for-usb-to-serial/

whilst it works it kept shutting the cmd window before I could read the contents so I made a batch file to pause it and it works a treat now

dtokez · 12 Aug 2015 at 13:11

Raumarik · 12 Aug 2015 at 13:15

Good to hear mate, not often serial stuff is still in use - except in healthcare etc!

dtokez · 12 Aug 2015 at 14:05

yeah I'm glad I've got something going now mate, thanks for the tips!

I'm a electronic engineer and a tinkerer so I do a lot of prototyping with arduino stuff and canbus etc, this will save me a good few clicks each time i need to check