Hi, List:

We have about 50 serial devices and we need to use a Lantronix COBOX-DR1 as a device driver (Ethernet/RS485) to connect them to a PC over a WAN.

The device server has a software called "COM Port Redirector", that intercepts communications to specified COM ports and sends them over an IP
network, as if it were one of the PC COM ports.

And here comes my question:
We have to develop a driver to communicate with those 50 serial devices over the WAN. Should I use this software and work in a "serial mode", or open directly a TCP socket in the COBOX-DR1?
I think that this redirecting software is very useful for existing serial drivers, but when you need to develop a new driver is better the second
solution.

Kind Regards.

Daniel Rallo.

 

> And here comes my question:
> We have to develop a driver to communicate with those 50
> serial devices over the WAN. Should I use this software and work in a
> "serial mode", or open directly a TCP socket in the COBOX-DR1?
> I think that this redirecting software is very useful for
> existing serial drivers, but when you need to develop a new driver is
better
> the second solution.

I would agree with you 100%. The less middlemen, the better.

Alex Pavloff
Software Engineer
Eason Technology

 

Speaking with much authority on this, you'll have much better luck doing a direct TCP socket design whenever possible (regardless of vendor). It means 1 less tool to maintain/install and the performance will be much better because YOU know when to send your TCP packet, while such indirect comm mimickers can only guess when your application has finished a packet, which will add some delay to every message. Plus Windoz was never designed to be happy with hundreds of fake serial ports - while it is designed (to some
extent) to have a very large number of sockets active.

Best Regards

Lynn August Linse, lynn (at) linse.org
3 Rue Monet, Foothill Ranch CA 92610-2482
Ph/Fx: 949-916-1524 (auto-detect voice or fax)

 

Daniel,

I've been in the same situation: deciding to use the vendor supplied serial port extender or write your own driver to communicate directly to the serial line server. Our first choice was to use the serial port extender, however after some months of implementing and testing this the problems kept popping up so we decided to change our software and use a TCP socket connection directly to the serial line server. This is now working for about 2 year in the field wihtout any problem. After that we made similar implementations for other types of serial line server using the same mechanism. They all work without problems.

Regards
Herman Chrisstoffer