[time-nuts] Serial Port Redirection Recommendation: com0com, com2tcp & hub4com

[Christian Vogel]

Hi,

to add a few cents to the discussion about Lady Heather's Client, I want
to recommend the following piece of software to the windows-using 'nuts:

	http://com0com.sourceforge.net/

This is a driver that provides for mutually connected virtual serial ports
under MS-Windows (I'm right now using it with Win7, x86) and there
are two additional programs: com2tcp and hub4com.

   Com2tcp connects a serial port (hardware or virtual) to a tcp-connection,
either as a server or as a client. hub4com allows more complicated routing
of serial-port data. With these tools, you can probably implement a lot of
the "several programs listening to a single gps" scenarios already and can
of course used whenever some old serially connected equipment has to be
talked to over the network.

   The attached screenshot is from my Windows-7 Desktop, where Tboltmon
talks to a Thunderbolt hanging on a Linux machine that has a small
TSIP-Multiplexer running I wrote with Twisted  
[http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/].

   The upper left shows com2tcp that connected to the Linux machine,
the lower left is the com0com configuration program and behind there's
the well known Thunderbolt Monitor from Trimble.
Of course, it also works with Lady Heather.

Once again using ASCII art in case my explanation above was a little  
confusing:

                                 +----------------Linux---------+
+-------------+                 |                              |
| Thunderbolt o-----(RS232)-----o ttyS0 --(Twisted)-- TCP:8000 |
+-------------+                 |                         |    |
                                 +-------------------------o----+
                                                           |
                       =====o==============================o===== (Ethernet)
                            |
                    +-------o------------Windows----+
                    |       |               +-----+ |
                    |    com2tcp -- COM3 ---o com | |
                    |                       |  0  | |
                    |   tboltmon -- COM2 ---o com | |
                    |                       +-----+ |
                    +-------------------------------+

I hope the ASCII Art comes through fine.

         Chris
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