Virtual Serial Port. Serial Data Filtering and GPS Tracking.

Serial Data Filtering. Here is the recent case study throughly discussed at most tech forums : "Image Systems are a medium sized company who are leaders in CCTV and Point of Sale integration in New Zealand. The current solutions offered by POS providers and CCTV data capture solutions Image Systems found were limited in their functionality. Using data capture via serial ports,a system to filter out unwanted data was created". Using Virtual Serial Port
Control OEM Image Systems Limited reduced the amount of hardware which is needed to filter out the data from the POS system. This has decreased time to market and decreased the cost to develop further. The Virtual Serial Port Control OEM has been included into new software using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, written using the C# programming language.
GPS Tracking. Another case study: "VE Teltronics develops products and services for the marine industry. Our focus is on GPS tracking systems in combination with fleet management. We offer our customer innovative and cost effective solutions. We will now launch our first product, "YachtSafe". This is a complete alarm system, with tracking possibilities, and different fleet management services. The system is specially designed for charter boats. It offers different supervision features for the boat owner and the charter company. One unique feature is the Ground detection. If the boat, on a charter, hits an under water rock, it will immediately send an alarm to the boat owner. The boat owner will also receive a log, which can be used to visualize
what have happen in a digital sea map in his computer. GPS data is received from the boat to the computer via the GSM network. The YachtSafe PC application will handle the incoming data and use a standard Sea map application in order to visualize the boat in a digital map. The communication between our application and the sea map application is done through a Virtual Serial Port. By using a virtual com port we have a generic way of communication, and supports most of the sea map applications on the market. The sea map applications is designed to listen to a comport for incoming GPS data, from a GPS device connected to the computer".
Virtual Serial Port is an ActiveX control which makes it possible to create virtual serial ports and control them fully. At the same time virtual ports look like as if they were real hardware serial ports for communications applications. The program provides a developer with full control over virtual serial port. VSPC + virtual serial port can as much as a serial device + a physical serial port. Moreover, Virtual Serial Port drives virtual serial port the same way as a serial device drives a physical serial port. If there is a task to provide interaction between communications application and your own program (e.g. hardware device emulator), there is no common solution to accomplish it. Virtual Serial Port Control allows to create additional virtual serial ports directly from your own program. And any communications application can work with them as if they were physical ports. On the other hand, developers API provided by the program allows your program to access the data written to virtual serial port by communications application and it also allows to respond with your own data. The data will be read by the communications application from the virtual serial port as if it were read from a physical port.

USB Monitor - analyze USB traffic for Windows

USB Monitor is an effective and simple in use analyzer of USB traffic for Windows. It allows to monitor incoming and outgoing data of a USB device plugged into the computer. USB adapter development is based on a long-standing experience in USB devices drivers development and you can easily make sure how much it's convenient and simple in use. Just choose the device and start monitoring. No critical information will pass by USB Monitor Pro. INTERNAL_IOCTLs, URB packets and IRP packets of PnP and PowerManagement subsystems will be captured and displayed immediately. The monitoring takes place in both directions (from device driver to the Host Controller Driver and vice versa). Format of captured data displaying is arranged to simplify data understanding as much as possible. Inspite of chronological ordering of captured information it's possible to get more detailed information (e.g. URB packet structure, hex-dump of packets carrying data) for every URB and INTERNAL_IOCTL packets at any time. Just click on a packet and you'll get it. USB Monitor Pro analyzes captured traffic and allows to immediately find URB request (or INTERNAL_IOCTL) come out to the Host Controller Driver and also corresponding URB packet processed by the Host Controller Driver. You will see both packets at once to compare them and then to make a corresponding conclusions.
USB Monitor general features:
Monitoring of data between USB device driver and the Host Controller Driver
Monitoring of all types of USB Request Block (URB)
Monitoring of all IOCTL_INTERNAL_USB_*
Monitoring of IRPs of PnP and Power Management subsystems
Updating list of packets in real time for non-stop analysis
Monitoring of a hot-plugged device
Saving of captured data for further examination
Separate records for request initiation and completion
Filtering mechanism for limiting the volume of captured data to concentrate on the most important information
Monitoring of several USB devices simultaneously
Software restart of USB device

USB adapter is compatible with Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003 Server, USB 1.x and 2.0

USb to Ethernet. USB switch.

There has been a lot of issues on how to share a USB device. Here I will give the best solution to do this. This solution is called USB to Ethernet. Let's discuss the following case study:

"We are using Virtual Desktop Infra and we need to access USB-based device - Panaboard. It basically captures information which is written on the board and converts it to digital format. Unfortunately, we could not detect this device on Virtual machine because of RDP limitation. We were looking for the solution for long time. Finally, we have found this usb switch tool . This tool is great and it perfectly meets any requirements".

See, how simple it is? =)

Synchronizing Remote Mobile Devices

Last week I got a new PDA-phone, an Xda Diamond. It is running Windows mobile 6.1 and of course it can sync its contacts, calendar, e-mail and tasks with Outlook. Using a tool called "Jeyo Mobile Extender" it can also sync its SMS messages to Outlook for backup and search purposes - very handy. I am using Windows Vista and Microsoft Outlook on my PC in my office and I don't use an Exchange Server or similar product.When I am at home and want to check my email or create a calendar event, I just connect to my office PC using RDP. But then my PDA isn't up to date any more, so there should be a possibility to sync it remotely.

Unfortunately Microsoft removed the network sync feature from current versions of ActiveSync, officially because of security problems. And although Windows Mobile 6.1 uses a virtual network connection and TCP for ActiveSync, I could not make it sync over VPN within reasonable time and effort.

So I had to look for another way and came across the idea to extend an USB port over Network. Not as nice as ActiveSync over WLAN but better than nothing. I googled for "USB over Network" and found several products. The first I tried was too complicated to setup, because it used a few TCP ports and an UDP port, which I cannot squeeze through an SSH tunnel. The next I tried was this USB to Network It looked quite nice and worked out of the box using a single TCP port that I could easily forward by SSH. But since it was quite expensive I looked for cheaper alternatives and came across another software which looked very similar. But this just didn't work, it connects as easily as the mentioned above product does, the USB device appears in the Device Manager but the Windows Vista Sync Center just won't recognize the connection. I suspect, this is because it takes to long for the device to answer, because there is a lot of data transferred over the tunnel. Maybe the mentioned program uses better compression or better timing - I dont' know. However, I was about to give up and live without syncing from home or try writing the virtual device driver by myself when FabulaTech contacted me and won me back by making an interesting offer.

FabulaTech develops Virtualization Solution Product Line

This article was taken from the popular resource. Giving it away (slightly changed).

"FabulaTech has started a virtualization campaign aimed at informing IT management and general publicity of the most comprehensive usb and serial port vitualization solutions providing a unified individual approach to developing and monitoring every single solution. The following list represents a long-awaited request by the public to summarize most popular virtualization solutions. Here we go.

USB virtualization solutions:

1. USB over Network. This is a software solution that allows to use remote USB devices as if they were plugged into one's own PC. This usb network solution allows to share any USB device without risk of losing it.

2. USB for Remote Desktop. It allows to work with local USB devices from remote Windows session. It supports a wide range of USB devices and does not require any special knowledge and installs easily right out of the box.

3. USB Redirector. The solution is designed to share USB device over LAN or the Internet and access remote USB devices.

4. USB Monitor. This solution is an effective and at the same time simple in use analyzer of USB traffic for Windows. It allows to monitor incoming and outgoing data of any USB device plugged into the computer.

Serial/COM port virtualization solutions:

1. Serial Port Mapper. It allows you to map any serial ports to any other ports. E.g. you install additional COM port expansion card to computer as COM7 serial port but your favorite software can work with COM1 port only. To resolve this problem you can use this solution.

2. Virtual Serial Port Kit. It's very useful for debugging. The solution creates pairs of virtual serial ports in your system which are virtually connected to each other. Physical null modem cables are not required. You can connect any number of virtual port pairs.

3. Virtual Serial Port Control. It creates virtual COM ports directly from your own programs and fully control them! Provide interaction between serial communications applications and your program.

4. Virtual Modem. There are many old communication applications that require a direct modem connection. This program allows you to substitute physical phone lines with a local TCP/IP network or the Internet without investing thousands into new communication software.

5. Serial Port Splitter. It shares dataflow of one COM port between several applications or vice versa to join dataflow of several COM port devices to one application.

6. Serial Port Redirector. The solution connects a serial application to a remote TCP socket. This allows you to utilize modern hardware COM servers without changing your software or exchange data between a TCP/IP application and an old-fashioned program that doesn't support TCP/IP.

7. Serial Port Control. This is an inexpensive royalty-free component. You can use it with any development environment, such as VB, VB .Net, VC++, C#, Delphi, etc. Just put it on a form and vou've got all the functionality you need to access an RS232 port. The event driven architecture makes it a snap to use. Just define a function in your program and it will be triggered automatically when new data is available through the port.

8.Network Serial Port Kit. You can connect data collection serial devices: bar code scanners, modems, sensors, gages, RF equipment, telephone PBX systems, laboratory or industrial instruments, and so on - to the serial ports of your computer to deliver that data anywhere over any TCP/IP based network. Program creates up to 254 virtual serial ports at a time. Physical COM ports located on remote computer can be connected to host computer over the network as well.

All the programs hold OEM license thus providing the possibility to be distributed as a part of any other software. Time to say "hello" to mobility and virtualization has come. "

Virtual Serial. Control virtual serial ports.

Virtual Serial Port Control is the virtual serial program which creates virtual serial ports and controls them. Created virtual ports look like as if they were real hardware serial ports for communications applications. What the program is meant for: sometimes there is a task to provide interaction between communications application and your own program (e.g. hardware device emulator), there is no common solution to accomplish it. Virtual Serial Port Control creates additional virtual serial ports directly from your own program. And any communications application can work with them as if they were physical ports.

Main features at a glance:

• Virtual serial ports look and work like real COM ports.
• Unlimited number of virtual COM ports can be created.
• Virtual serial ports can have the same names as existing hardware COM ports (e.g. COM1).
• Powerful and intuitive interface to make serial port communications easy.
• Delivers all the capabilities of the Win32 Serial Communications API.
• Notifies your application when data arrives or events occur on the port.
• Supports reading and writing of binary data.
• Full buffered data transfer.
• Comes with example applications (Visual Basic, Visual C++).
• Can be redistributed as part of your application.

I give 5-star rating to this program.

How to: Control Serial Ports

It's very easy to create and control virtual serial ports. Moreover, you can connect any serial application to it. Today we will talk about the program which accomplish this task perfectly. Virtual Serial Port Control. Being an ActiveX control which makes it possible to create virtual serial ports and control them fully, the program creates virtual ports which look like as if they were real hardware serial ports for communications applications. Port Control allows you to create additional virtual serial ports directly from your own program. And any communications application can work with them as if they were physical ports.

The event driven architecture is a soft snap. You don't have to check ports periodically in order to find whether their state is changed or new data is available for reading from the virtual port. Just define the needed function in your program that will be triggered automatically by the appropriate event and that will process the data.

At the same time the Virtual Serial Port Control immediately notifies your application about any actions done to the serial port by the communications application (port opening/closing, setting DTR/RTS handshake, baudrate setting, XON/XOFF symbols setting, etc).

Main program's features at a glance:

• Virtual serial ports look and work like real COM ports.
• Unlimited number of virtual COM ports can be created.
• Virtual serial ports can have the same names as existing hardware COM ports (e.g. COM1).
• Powerful and intuitive interface to make serial port communications easy.
• Delivers all the capabilities of the Win32 Serial Communications API.
• Notifies your application when data arrives or events occur on the port.
• Supports reading and writing of binary data.
• Full buffered data transfer.
• Comes with example applications (Visual Basic, Visual C++).
• Can be redistributed as part of your application.

The program is compatible with full Microsoft serial.sys, PnP and WMI technologies, Hyper-Threading Technology, VMware, Serial data bitrate (transmission speed) emulation, Virtual serial ports configuration via Windows Device Manager.