If you have used some form of hardware especially those legacy ones or something like the Arduino and other embedded systems you must have come across the term Serial Port, FTDI chip, USB to Serial, or RS232 at some point. So what are those? Well, they mean the same thing – Serial Communication
Serial Port is a serial communication interface that has been the backbone of industrial data transfer and even embedded computers (MCUs, SBC, SoC and Others) still provide support for it in one way or the other way. Although you might not be seeing the traditional RS-232 serial port again, the serial port still get used along with USB to Serial converters using things like FTDI chip.
Serial ports are not going out of market anything soon despite the fact we have modern – high speed interfaces like FireWire, USB, Ethernet, and Wireless, merely because they are super easy to use and require no particular custom driver and operating systems already provide support for them. But, what you can do when there is no Serial Port available to a system? What about creating a Virtual Serial (COM) port?
Virtual serial ports are great when access to serial ports is not available, and a software application needs a connection to a serial device but cannot connect to it due to a physical lack of serial ports. Here, the computer will be reconfigured to send serial port data over LAN (local area network) or some other interface and then send data back to itself. This is basically is a virtual serial port. So how do you create one? Use a virtual serial port software, they are several of them and the Virtual COM Port Driver from Eltima is one I have tried out that seems interesting.
Read more: A QUICK OVERVIEW OF THE ELTIMA VIRTUAL SERIAL PORT DRIVER
