Serial communication emulation in Windows

Question

I want to emulate an Arduino serial communication in Windows. I wrote this pySerial script to represent the connection:

from serial import Serial
from time import sleep

serial_conn = Serial(<some port>)
serial_conn.baudrate = 9600

for i in range(1,10):
    serial_conn.write(<dummy data>)
    sleep(1)

The problem is the following: I tried to use available serial ports (like COM1 or COM3 for example) but I can't sniff the port with a serial monitor tool. It's because I need hardware to open the port? Or maybe the problem are the tested ports? (maybe Windows uses the COM1 for comm as Linux uses the first serial too). Should I try with a virtual serial ports tool? If that's the point, can you recomend me someone and the usage?

Answer 1

In Windows hardware and virtual serial ports have the same enumeration scheme, so they will be COM. The problem is that only one program at time (theorically) can use a Serial port, so if the port is used by your Python program, it won't be available to the terminal.

You should setup a fake COM, and this mean a custom driver... too much difficult.

Socket, file and standard input can be read/written one byte a time, so you can test your parser using them.