Serial Port Emulator

The Corinthian

I'm presently doing some work which involves communicating with industrial equipment via serial port (over RS232). Pretty straightforward set-up and no handshake needed in the connection - I send commands, I get data responses.

Now as I said, this is industrial equipment, so it's not like I can have one of these next to my PC, or camp next to it on the factory floor when coding. As such, what I'd like to find is something to emulate a COM-port which can be set up to do the expected request-responses while developing.

There's a few of these around, if one Google's, but would like to know if anyone can recommend one based upon my above requirements - ideally open source.

that_other_guy

I've used this when developing serial port applications :
http://sourceforge.net/projects/com0com/

Install the Null-modem emulator and it creates virtual port pairs on your PC. Write data to one COM Port and you can read that data from its pair and vice versa.

Just write another program to emulate the industrial equipment to read from/write to that COM Port with the expected request/responses

Hope this helps

The Corinthian

Thanks. Ideally if the emulator could be programmed to send even static responses would be nice, but I suppose you can't have everything.