Re: [Boost-users] Asio Serial ports: enumerating all the devices

Subject: Re: [Boost-users] Asio Serial ports: enumerating all the devices
From: Michael Steinberg (michael.steinberg_at_[hidden])
Date: 2013-04-11 14:17:46

> "vendor id, product id "
> What's that ?
> I mean for a serial device.  If they are present in the device 
> protocol then fine, but that depends on the individual devices and 
> their protocols.
> You can check whether there has been any traffic, which might be 
> useful, but serial connections are just streams of bytes.
>
I think the OP might be mixing up serial-bridges with the actual bridged 
serial devices. E.g. FTDI-bridges have a Vendor-ID, Product-ID pair 
which can be used to identify bridged serial devices, if you assign 
special values. However, only their proprietary drivers (d2xx) allow 
enumerating the bridges attached to the PC. So there is no 
cross-platform or even a cross-vendor way to do that. However, if you 
know that your devices are FTDI-bridges and you happen to work on OS's 
with driver support, then you can bypass the virtual serial ports 
alltogether and identify/enumerate/communicate with the devices (I'm not 
too sure if the d2xx-drivers hand out handles that you can use with the 
usual OS file API though).

Regards,
Michael