As a developer of serial software (and/or hardware), you may face the situation when you need to open the same COM port with several apps at a time. For instance, you want to provide access to a COM-based peripheral connected to a serial port from several control apps simultaneously. Or you might need your serial device to send its data via a COM interface to several applications installed on your computer. These situations are not rare, especially if you’re working with POS systems, LIMS, industrial controllers, СNС machines, etc.
What at first glance may appear simple often turns out to be a real challenge. Splitting the data of a physical COM interface is no small task unless you use some additional dedicated third-party tools.
Eltima Port Virtualization Technology (EPVT) is a unique solution that gives you the way to share a real COM interface among as many serial apps as you need. The technology is designed to create virtual copies of physical serial interfaces. You simply connect all the required apps to virtual copies of the same physical COM port and they all receive the same data at a time. You can also grant access rights to a particular program and configure the connection parameters (baud rate, data bits, parity, etc.).
With Eltima Port Virtualization Technology, you can not only share COM ports among multiple programs but redirect data from one physical serial port to another real (or virtual) interface. Also, you’ll be able to create complex bundles of real and virtual serial ports, join data from several serial interfaces into a single data stream, and more.
On top of that, EPVT is the simplest way to log all activities related to using the shared serial port. For example, you’ll see which particular app opened the COM interface and which parameters were accessed.
