How to capture serial port data

How to capture COM port data using Serial Port Monitor?

Through the COM ports of your computers, you can connect to it all sorts of scientific equipment and industrial gear. From there you can automatically send all the necessary data straight to any sort of database, log, chart, spreadsheet, or other tools for display and analysis. This will keep you safe from transcription errors and will save a great deal of time.

But for that, you would need an application specifically designed for capturing the arriving data on the COM port. Serial data capture software might be a good fit. By the way, from this article, you can get some key information on the serial communication settings, s.a. baud rate, COM port number, stop bits, data bits, and parity. That’s particularly important for testing COM port.

1. To start capturing serial data, one will need to download Serial Port Monitor, install and start the application. After that, a new session should be started.
2. Select the “New session” option from the “Session” menu. Other ways are to choose “New” on the toolbar or press “Ctrl+N”.
3. Select the COM port to monitor and the visualizers that will be displayed.
   
   
4. Choose whether you would like to “Start monitoring now” or “Start in new window” for the immediate behavior of a new session.
5. In “Capture options” specify the events you’d like to capture – Create/Close, Read/Write, Device Control.
   
   
6. Select “Start monitoring” to begin the session.
   
   
7. To save the session, select “Session → Save session/ Save session As” in the main menu. Also, you can click the “Save” icon on the main toolbar or press “Ctrl + S”.

Every view can be exported into the separate logs of various formats (HTML, ANSI/UNICODE TXT). Besides, serial data captured from the Table view can be saved to a CSV file and used in MS Excel. To export a view, select the “Export to” option in the view menu on the toolbar.

Serial Port Monitor customer's feedback

When trying to build a custom dashboard for a third party Li-Ion Battery Management System based on Texas Instruments BQ76940 and Atmel 8-bit line of microcontrollers, the integrated circuit manufacturer provided a "brief" description of the communication protocol. This description wasn't enough or complete, so analyzing the protocol transmitted while using the manufacturer provided a Windows-based dashboard was a must. Electronic Team's Serial Port Monitor with the capability of "sniffing" open serial ports on the Windows platform was the best tool to do the job. Now I can see in realtime the protocol flow and understand the documentation, saving me a lot of trial and error while programming. I'm very happy about having found this piece of software.

Eduardo Roldan (Linux Expert, DIYer, EV Enthusiast)

Why capture data from the COM port?

Tracking down a problem that might appear during the development stage of the custom application or a driver for a COM device and dealing with it in the shortest time would not be possible without the ability to capture serial data and store it for the later use and analysis.

Unfortunately, Windows does not offer any built into the OS utilities that would help achieve this. So, one would need to resort to the help of specialized, Serial port Monitor that would assist with capturing and examining the data exchange between RS232 devices and Windows applications