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company: WB Electronics ApS www.wbelectronics.com

Virtual Serial Port ActiveX Control

• industry: software development
• location: Herning, Denmark
• representative: Martin Voss, a Software engineer
• gifts from Eltima: free upgrade to VSP AX 4.5 OEM; life-time free upgrades to all future major versions of VSP AX OEM; 50% discount on VSP AX source code license

Janna Chelsy: What were your main challenges which made you searching for this kind of software?

Martin Voss: We needed to connect a USB device to the PC which would normally have a standard RS232 COM port. A lot of different 3rd party software was/is already developed for this (and similar) devices, but all of the software uses the COM port for communications. We needed a virtual COM port in order to support the different 3rd party software.

Our own software would always be able to access our device through USB, but for the already available 3rd party software we needed a VCP [Virtual COM Port] which would work directly with all the different pieces of software without modification. In order to achieve this compatibility we had been looking at a lot of different hardware based USB to Serial bridges and VCP solutions, but some of these were not good enough (too slow, or bad timing) or the price was to high (unit based pricing).

We needed a flexible solution in order to achieve the best compatibility with a lot of different software, and the most flexible solution (for a fair price) was Eltima's VSP [Virtual Serial Port ActiveX Control].

Janna Chelsy: How did you first know about VSP AX by Eltima Software?

Martin Voss: We did a lot of research for hardware and software VCP solutions. Only a few serious and professional solutions appeared and all of these were researched further.

Janna Chelsy: So, you looked at other software before choosing Eltima solution. Let me know what made you prefer our product.

Martin Voss: Yes we did try at least 2-3 other products very similar to yours. Some of these did not have the technical features which were needed so they were unusable. At least one of the other products did have the features we needed and I did test this product along with Eltima's VSP very thoroughly. At the end we chose Eltima's VSP, primarily because of the reasons listed below.

• Eltima's Company profile and product portfolio looked professional and serious
• Eltima responded to any support and sales requests within timely manner
• The Eltima VSP was the technical best solution for our needs (Flexible solution)
• The VSP is fairly easy to get started with and easy to use
• Eltima were able to supply us with a custom VSP demo which made it possible for us to try out the VSP in our custom application to make sure it would work as expected [Janna: we did create a custom demo to best match Martin's test environment, and at the same time not feel anyhow restricted by the demo limitations]
• Eltima offers frequent updates of their software (including bug fixes)
• Eltima is fairly foresighted and quick to adapt to new versions of Windows (64bit support etc) [Janna: we are already working on porting our products to Vista platform, and adjust the features to best fit the new system]
• Eltima offered licensing options and pricing which fit our needs very well (No unit royalties)

Janna Chelsy: How are you using VSP AX at the moment? What are the main goals that you achieve with our solution?

Martin Voss: Our product is a USB based smartcard reader (To know more visit http://www.infinityusb.com). We have our own custom software which covers a lot of basic smartcards and a lot of basic needs but there are many generic features of our device which other 3rd party software can take advantage of. The problem is that all these different software require a regular COM port to access the smartcard.

Our primary software can then dynamically create a virtual COM port when needed. The software makes sure to setup the correct frequency and voltage to the card and then it creates the virtual COM port and the software then minimizes to systray, making it possible for the user to use any 3rd party software compatible with his or her smartcard.

When the user is done using the 3rd party software our primary software is then maximized and it closes the virtual COM port and is ready for further user interaction. We use the Eltima VSP AX to make a connection between different 3rd party COM port applications and our USB based hardware device. This connection could either be made by a hardware VCP chip + VCP driver, or by a single software VCP solution.

In order to keep costs down and have a high degree of flexibility we chose the software based VCP. Our primary software is used by our customers for "simple" communication with our USB based device. For custom or advanced usage of our device a lot of COM port based 3rd party software exists. We make a connection between these COM port applications and our USB device by using the VSP in our primary software.

In our software our customers have the option of dynamically adding a virtual COM port to the system when our software cannot handle the customer's specific need but he has 3rd party COM port software which can handle his need. For many minor developers it is fairly easy to access the COM port which makes it easier for them to make software for our device rather than using a custom USB driver to do the job.

Janna Chelsy: Can you sum it up how you actually benefit from using Eltima Virtual Serial Port ActiveX?

Martin Voss: Sure.

1. Eltima's VSP provided a flexible solution with a licensing option which suited our needs very well.
2. By using the VSP we did not need any specific hardware VCP chip which helps to keep costs down.
3. The VSP made it possible for us to support all the different 3rd party software available for our USB device.
4. Our product can be used with our own native USB software which also handles the VSP creation. This makes it possible for our customers to dynamically add a virtual COM port to the system when needed, and the port is not available when it is not needed. The dynamic creation of the VSP was a plus for us.

Janna Chelsy: Martin, thank you so much for your time!

Martin Voss: No problem. I hope this info helps other people to use Eltima solutions at their maximum potential.