Virtual Serial Ports emulator (VSPE) is intended to help people to deal with such a thing as a serial port. Nowadays, serial ports are not used widely anymore. The reason is simple: it is a quite old stuff. Modern hardware devices as a rule connect to computers via high-speed USB ports and sometimes install their own UsbToCom driver. Serial ports are not installed in the most of new notebooks.
So why was VSPE created?
- There are plenty of specific devices that require RS232 or RS422 compatible serial ports. VSPE can help developers to create and debug applications without real hardware installed.
- Compatibility with old applications. VSPE can help people to make data stream from any source (like TCP connection, USB port and so on) visible to any program via virtual serial port.
- To create a lot of virtual serial ports working simultaneously. You can do it without installing serial ports extension board.
- To share serial port for many applications.
VSPE has limitations described in the
Known limitations and bugs section.
At current stage our main goals are:
- To provide binary data exchange between applications or devices.
- To create original solutions. The Connector and the DataSplitter devices are obvious examples of such solutions: they create COM ports that can be opened more that once.
- To provide easy user interface.
VSPE current status is beta.
- Virtual device: connector (Kernel mode)
- Virtual device: data splitter (Kernel mode)
- Virtual device: pair (Kernel mode)
- Kernel mode device: Mapper
- User mode device: TcpServer
- User mode device: TcpClient
- User mode device: Serial Redirector
- User mode device: UDP Manager
- User mode device: Bridge
- Data monitoring and recording
- Embedded HTTP server
- x86 and x86_64 processor architecture support
- Embedded Lua script language
- VSPE API (C/C++ header and static library) for native language developers
- VSPE API Python bindings for Python developers
- VSPE API COM interface
