If you are developing solutions for USB connected Energy Monitors, then you may run into the situation where you want your monitor to operate in a production sense, i.e. to record energy metrics for real data , but also to use that data in a development sense.
One way to share your energy monitor with multiple applications is to split the serial port so that data coming into 1 serial port (COM3) is also available to COM4 and or any number of additional ports. You can also use Serial to TCP/IP and make a serial port available on another PC on your local network.
There are two software solutions that we have been using that are free to use for this purpose.
The first is from a commercial company who has kindly made their own tools available:
HW VSP Free Virtual Serial Port to connect any TCP/IP Terminal server to your Windows as a virtual serial port (e.g. COM 7). Produced by
www.HW-group.com.
This product we have tested on Windows Server 2008, Windows 7 in both 32 and 64 bit versions.
An alternative open source Null Modem solution is com0com:
SourceForge Project Page
Once these virtual drivers are installed you can write a small application that receives data from one port (COM3) and redirects or mirrors that data to one or more additional serial ports that can connect to more than one application.
In addition, you could set up Serial to TCP to make the comports of a remote machine available on our local machine.
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