4 Windows Virtual COM Driver
4.4 Configuration of the Virtual COM Driver
If properly configured, the serial ports of the NetCom
+
Devices appear as Virtual Com Ports in
your computer. The "virtual" means, in the computer is no real hardware related to the serial port,
however the driver offers the full functionality of a serial port to the system. The interface used by
the driver is VCOMM, which in turn is supported by the Windows API. So Windows does not see
a difference to Com1, and also no application should detect the change.
When the serial ports are installed by the Virtual Com driver software, any application may use
them. In the Device Manager they appear as
NetCom Plus COM Port
(figure
30
). Without special
tests a program does not see a difference between Com1 and the virtual Com7. For example the
Hyper Terminal
4
program has no problem to communicate through these Virtual Com Port. And
this situation is common amongst most programs.
4.4.1 Configure the Serial Ports
A typical application selects a serial port, and opens it.
After that it performs the standard
configuration of bits per character, parity settings and number of stop bits. Also the flow control
(handshaking) is defined by the application. Windows sends these requests to the port driver, and
this driver sends the requests to the serial port on the NetCom
+
.
Figure 31: NetCom
+
COM Port Serial Settings
4
or
PuTTY
Terminal Emulation
September 2016
NetCom Plus User Manual
38
