Serial Port Splitter

[Audio] Hello ALL , Today we would like to present you all our Hackathon idea Serial Port Splitter.

[Audio] What is a serial port ? a serial port is a serial communication interface through which information transfers in or out sequentially one bit at a time. It provides bidirectional communication interface that allows sending and receiving data . Serial ports are widely used in Configuration and management of networking equipment such as routers, switches, firewalls, load balancers. They are also used by different sensors for data acquisition. For example, GPS receivers uses this to transit GPS data. Now coming to the problem statement Usually when we need to access the serial device connected to the serial port we use serial communication program but what if you need to access the device from several programs at same time ? , Operating system doesn't not allow simultaneous COM port connections . Once a port is opened by one application, it is locked and other applications trying to connect to the same port will fail..

[Audio] Here is an example Assume we have 3 applications which requires the data from the GPS module which will actually transmit the data through a serial port and with the current scenario only one application can stream the data from serial port and other application has to wait until the first application release the serial port..

4. DELL CONFIDENTIAL. Serial Port Splitter. Solution Serial Port Splitter allows to split the serial port to several virtual COM ports which makes multiple applications to access the same serial port data via spitted virtual COM ports simultaneously. Using virtual COM port, each application "thinks" that it works with real device connected to physical COM port. Serial Port Splitter provides you with the full set of capabilities for parallel working with several serial applications or devices..

5. DELL CONFIDENTIAL. Serial Port Splitter. Existing Workflow.

6. DELL CONFIDENTIAL. Serial Port Splitter. Novelty and Advantages Customers can split the serial port to multiple virtual COM ports according to their application needs. Without the need of the actual hardware, we can use this software based user-friendly serial port splitter application to connect with virtual com ports and sniff the data communication. Reduces the hardware dependency and the hardware cost . Easy maintenance Easy to combine multiple serial ports into a single virtual one and also splitting a single real port into multiple virtual interfaces. It can be leveraged on any Dell applications that does the serial port communication. For example : Dell Rugged control center application uses the serial port to stream the GPS data, but customer had their own set of applications to receive the GPS data using serial port. But since serial port can’t be shared, the user was not able to receive the data in his applications..