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

Subject: Re: [Boost-users] Asio Serial ports: enumerating all the devices
From: Kerry, Richard (richard.kerry_at_[hidden])
Date: 2013-04-12 05:40:37

Yes, quite possibly.

That's quite close to what I was trying to say with respect to the /dev contents.

All that is probably possible would be to enumerate is serial interfaces (COM ports, in Windows parlance).

Or to enumerate all devices then somehow query them for their type to ascertain that they are serial ports.

There's no way to determine the connected devices.

A quick Google search tells me FTDI devices are serial-ports accessed via USB. ComTrol devices are similar in that they are serial ports accessed via Ethernet. I guess there are other ways of making a serial port available.

Regards,

Richard.

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From: Boost-users [boost-users-bounces_at_[hidden]] on behalf of Michael Steinberg [michael.steinberg_at_[hidden]]
Sent: 11 April 2013 19:17
To: boost-users_at_[hidden]
Subject: Re: [Boost-users] Asio Serial ports: enumerating all the devices

"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