Hello,

In my program I need to present the user with a list of available serial and usb-serial ports on the system they are using. How do I detect in my program these ports?. (something like GetPortList() in Delphi-7???).

One port is used by a milling-machine to receive its position and speed commands, the other port is used by a controller for switching the machine automaticaly on/off and start or end of the milling and measure and detect the roughness of the surface area of the material to be processed.

Thanks in advance,

grtjs Piet

For which operating system?

I use the synaser unit - works for fpc 2.4, win and I think for other o/s too - google for info - it has the capability to look for serial ports, set baud rates, and to do character & block input & output.

hth John

Wich OS?

If Windows, you can use the function BuildCommDCB, and pass the following string as param:

COMx: baud=1200 parity=N data=8 stop=1

if COMx exists on your system, this function will return true.

See:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa363143(v=vs.85).aspx

On linux, i don't found any other way than check if exists /dev/ttyUSBx devices.

Regards,

Fabio

2011/7/27 John Lee :

Look here for how synaser does it:

http://synalist.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/synalist/trunk/synaser.pas?revision=146&view=markup#l2280

For linux you can look for /dev/ttyS* and /dev/ttyUSB*, but they may be called anything in practice.

Henry

Debian and Ubuntu

grtjs Piet

I'd expect (recent versions of) those to only create devices that were known to exist. I detect what's available by looking for up to 12 /dev/ttyS*, 8 /dev/ttyUSB* and 4 /dev/ttyI*, then later checking that they can actually be opened (bearing in mind that this might glitch a control line).

It's worth noting that a few weeks ago I was updating the standard serial.pp unit and noticed that Solaris designated serial ports as /dev/ttya and /dev/ttyb.

Windows of course is \COM1, or strictly \\.\COM1 etc.; I note Fabio's test but in the past have used the registry to find e.g. named ports simulated by an AVR box.

I'm a little curious to know how vmware workstation lists the serial ports on linux. It's the unique software that does this right that I know.

Regards,

Fabio

2011/7/27 Mark Morgan Lloyd :

----- Original Message -----

I was discussing this elsewhere a few days ago and a Windows developer pointed out to me that the Windows COMn names are simply a convention, and that a driver writer can choose whatever he wants. A bit of Googling suggests that HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\HARDWARE\DEVICEMAP\SERIALCOMM is worth looking at, but I don't know how portable (i.e. over different versions and variants of Windows) that is.

Google also suggests that in some cases (Bluetooth?) the registry might append a garbage character, and that possibly reading it multiple times might improve things.