Open Source Serial Port Sniffer

I'm dealing with some legacy systems that are using RS232 to communicate with peripherals. I'm not very experienced with COM interfacing. I have some code that can open and use COM ports, but it can't open ports that are used by other applications. I need to black box the packets so that we can use the same protocol for updated communications. Is there any way to 'middle man' incoming packets to an open COM port and detect what packets are being sent? I'm using.NET, but I'm open to any type of solution. (I found out there, but I don't think this will work for me.).

Jan 20, 2009 - Portmon from sysinternals (now MSFT) is probably the best monitor. I haven't found a good free tool that will emulate a port and record/replay. Sep 1, 2013 - I think the best way to understand the serial communication is with special software( as you were planning). You need to sniff and monitor serial.

Fujitsu flash mcu programmer download. I've used com0com - it's great for setting up virtual com ports - which doesn't help you at all. The COM port interface is basically a 'file read'.

My application throws an exception when I try to connect to a COM port that already has another instance reading from it. I'm not sure if you could try opening it as a 'read only' instead of read-write, but it's worth a try. You should be able to write a virtual com port that can fork off your data to a log file. Com0com is open-source, so you could use that as a starting point. Another possible solution could be to pick up an forks the serial signal to another serial port. Or yet another possibility is a (or an ). Or try the from the same com0com website!

Is there any way to 'middle man' Yes, there are many. Strongly supported in Windows through the concept of a 'filter driver'. Such a driver can be inserted ahead of a driver that get I/O requests and sees everything that passes. Normally intended to alter I/O requests but also very suitable for simply monitoring the requests. Man in the middle. The canonical example of such a driver is the venerable. Shows you everything that an app sends and receives to/from a serial port, including configuration and data.

There are many such apps, just Google 'serial port filter driver' (heavy on source code samples) and 'serial port monitor'. One footnote with this, you do tend to have a problem on a 64-bit version of Windows. The vast majority of these apps, including PortMon, only work on the 32-bit version. The 64-bit version only allows certified drivers to be installed, there is very little money in selling these apps to justify the expense. Beware of this when you shop. I have been down this same path.

A hardware splitter is the easiest solution. Hub4com setup will involve the 'Add New Hardware' wizard. If you have a lot of machines, geographically separated machines, or users who are not technically savvy and lack the permissions necessary, installation could be awkward. If this is a legacy application, does it run in ntvdm? If so, you could run it in instead and alter the DosBox code to write to a file in addition to sending/receiving to/from the serial port. DosBox is cross platform as well.