DAEnetIP3-Wx is Wi-Fi module for remote monitoring and control in Ethernet based networks. It includes 16 digital outputs, 8 analog inputs, 8 digital inputs and one UART port. It can be configurated via Web browser, TCP/IP, Virtual Serial Port, HTTP requests, Telnet and serial commands. The Lyric T5 Wi-Fi Thermostat allows you to take comfort knowing your home temperature will always be just how you like it. It's easy to install and use.
Hello All, I'm looking around for some serial-to-Wifi modules connecting to a Wifi virtual com port on the PC. The only product I found up to now is this one here: This example shows an 'ad-hoc' setup but I would also bee happy with an 'infrastructure' system. I bought one of these for testing (not received yet) but their interface is too big to fit in the project I built already; in any case, I will have to find a smaller module. I might not be the best Googler on earth, but I'm surprised not being able to find more than this only example (.especially for a VCOM piece of software). Is the vocabulary I use for searching wrong? Does this system have a particular name?
Is this not common at all? If anyone has seen/done/found something like this before I'll be really happy the here about. Tibbo, Lantronix, Netburner and Wiznet do such modules.
With the Wiznet I had some issues. Maybe because of the Power supply not supplying enough current. Never managed to make it work. Lantronix is my favorite though most expensive I suppose.
Anyway, they all are in the logic of Serial to Ethernet and then your PC will run a piece of software to read the Ethernet and convert it to Virtual Com Port. Then your old software can just read the virtual serial port as if it was a real Serial data arriving from your Serial device connected locally.
I am confused about the these 3 concepts. My understanding is, Serial Port usually means RS-232 compatible port (RS = Recommended Standard). USB stands for Universal Serial Bus. So its name contains serial port, does it support RS-232? What does the Universal mean? And what does COM port mean? ADD 1 Some understanding from Hans' answer: To reduce effort, device manufacturers usually make their device can behave like a serial port device as well.
This relies on the the fact that many OS and language libraries have already included serial port communication support. Though such support is no comparable to a real matching device driver. ADD 2 A good reference doc about. And btw, is really useful. Serial port is a type of device that uses an UART chip, a Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter.
One of the two basic ways to interface a computer in the olden days, parallel ports were the other way. Serial is simple to hook up, it doesn't need a lot of wires. Parallel was useful if you wanted to go fast, typ 8 times faster than serial, but cables and connectors were expensive. Parallel I/O has completely disappeared from computer designs, caught up by tremendous advances in bus transceivers, the kind of chip that can transmit an electrical signal down a wire. COM comes from MS-Dos, it is a device name.
Short for 'COMmunication port'. Computers in the 1980's usually had two serial ports, labeled COM1 and COM2 on the back of the machine. This name was carried forward into Windows, most any driver that simulates a serial port will create a device with 'COM' in its name. LPT was the device name for parallel ports, short for 'Line PrinTer'.
RS-232 was an electrical signaling standard for serial ports. It is the simplest one with very low demands on the device, supporting just a point-to-point connection.
RS-422 and RS-485 were not uncommon, using a twisted pair for each signal, providing much higher noise immunity and allowing multiple devices connected to each other. USB means Universal Serial Bus. Empowered by the ability to integrate a micro-processor into devices that's a few millimeters in size and costs a few dimes. It replaced legacy devices in the latter 1990s.
It is Universal because it can support many different kinds of devices, from coffee-pot warmers to disk drives to wifi adapters to audio playback. It is Serial, it only requires 4 wires. And it is a Bus, you can plug a USB device into an arbitrary port.
It competed with FireWire, a very similar approach and championed by Apple, but won by a land-slide. The only reason that serial ports are still relevant in on Windows these days is because a USB device requires a custom device driver. Device manufacturers do not like writing and supporting drivers, they often take a shortcut in their driver that makes it emulate a legacy serial port device. So programmers can use the legacy support for serial ports built into the operating system and about any language runtime library. Rather imperfect support btw, these emulators never support plug-and-play well. Discovering the specific serial port to open is very difficult.
And these drivers often misbehave in impossible to diagnose ways when you jerk a USB device while your program is using it. 'The only reason that serial ports are still relevant in computing these days.' - That sounds like a PC-centric perspective, not an accurate computer industry-wide viewpoint. SoCs almost always have at least one UART for a serial console, since a UART is easy in both the HW and SW sense to use for an interface. 'a USB device requires a device driver.' - All devices (regardless of the bus) require a driver. Whether you have to install it or if it's already in the OS is another issue.
USB requires a protocol stack (because it's a multi-device bus). – Jan 14 '15 at 18:26. USB stand for Universal Serial Bus not Port. The term 'serial port' simply means that the data is transferred one bit at a time over a single signal path - in that sense even Ethernet is serial in nature. The word serial in both terms implies no relationship other the width of the data path. You are right in that the term serial-port in the context of a PC normally means an RS-232 port, but there are other serial port standards such as RS-422 and RS-485 often used in industrial applications.
What these have in common is that they are implemented using a UART. The term Universal in USB merely reflects the fact that it is not a specific device interface such as the dedicated mouse or keyboard ports found on older hardware. Similarly a UART based serial port is not device specific, reflected by the U in UART. USB differs significantly from RS-232 in a number of ways; it is a master/slave (or host/device in USB terminology), rather than peer-to-peer, the USB device cannot initiate communication, it must be polled by the host. USB includes a low-voltage power supply to allow devices with moderate power requirements to be powered by the bus - that is also why USB ports can be used for charging battery powered devices.
USB is significantly more complex that RS-232 which defines only the physical (hardware) layer whereas USB requires a complete software protocol stack. The term COM is just a device name prefix used in Windows (and previously MS-DOS) for a serial (UART) port. Short for 'communications', you can for example open a COM port as a stream I/O device with say FILE. port = fopen( 'COM1', 'wr' ).