My New Laptop Does
Not Have a Serial Port However It Does Have a USP Port - What Do I
Do?
Many new laptop computers and some
desktop models are now being shipped
without RS232 serial ports and instead are equipped with USB ports.
Because
of this we are often asked how to deal with this situation. The most
common
question is "Can WinWedge (or any other serial communications
software)
communicate over a USB port instead of a RS232 serial port?"
The quick answer:
Strictly speaking, the answer is "No" however you can still use
WinWedge (or
any other serial communications software) to communicate with RS232
serial
devices through a USB port as long as you get a RS232 to USB
converter.
There are a number of companies that sell USB to RS232 converters as
well as
other add-on multi port serial adapters that connect to a PC through
the USB
port. All of these converters and add-on adapters are supplied with
a
Windows "device driver" that gets installed in your PC. The device
driver
software causes the PC to treat the USB to RS232 converter as if it
were an
actual RS232 serial port installed on the motherboard of the
computer.
Single port USB to RS232 converters are commonly available at most
computer
supply stores for under $20.00 and multi port add-on adapters are
also
widely available at reasonable prices. All of these products will
work just fine with WinWedge or any other Windows based serial
communications software.
More Information:
Although USB stands for "Universal Serial Bus", the USB interface
does not
work anything at all like a standard RS232 serial port. Like RS232
serial
ports, the USB ports on a PC are designed for interfacing external
devices,
however any device that is designed to connect to a USB port must
come with
a Windows "device driver" that essentially informs the operating
system when
the device is connected or disconnected to the PC and also provides
a
software interface to the device. A device driver is basically a
small
software program that provides a standard software interface to a
particular
hardware device. What this means is that practically any device
could be
designed to connect to a USB port as long as the device is supplied
with a
driver. The only problem with the USB interface design is that there
is no
way to simply open up a USB port and communicate with any device the
same
way that you can with a RS232 serial port. Any software that
communicates
with a particular USB device must communicate with the device
through the
driver that is supplied with the USB device. Fortunately, in the
case of USB
to RS232 converters, the drivers that come with them all emulate a
standard
RS232 communications port so you can use the USB to RS232 converters
to
communicate with any RS232 serial device using any standard Windows
based
serial communications software. |
