Serial Port Monitor

I’m working in the French national research organization (CNRS), and my work consists of developing experiment management software. I therefore write programs that communicate with all kinds of electronic devices (temperature controllers, dimmers, electronic scales, power supplies, cameras, frequency generators, etc.) under different communication protocols (modbus, RS232, RS422). , RS485, HPIB, TCP-IP…).

Lately, I have been writing a program controlling, among other things, an RS232 temperature controller. To send it information, I use register addresses in which I will read or write data. Unfortunately, in the various manuals that I have consulted, not all the addresses are provided. For example, to write the name of the temperature profile that I want to enter into the device, I have no information as to the address to use.

It was thanks to your software that I was able to find all the addresses I needed to write this program. To do this, I used the software provided by the manufacturer of the temperature controllers, I sent instructions to the device for reading and writing while your “Serial Port Monitor” software read in the background. I found it very easy to use, very complete, very reliable and very efficient. All the data was easily usable thanks to the different colors used. This is how I was able to know the type of instruction (data) and the addresses that I had to use.

The times of monitoring serial communication with special cables and extra hardware are over. No special cables or special hardware needed. This piece of sofware is great!

Surprisingly, this non-intrusive serial monitor tool can even be connected to a COM port already opened by an application to start analyzing the serial port activity. Moreover, the serial port sniffer has a unique functionality of simultaneously monitoring multiple COM ports. There’s also a terminal mode feature so that you can send data in various formats to the monitored serial port as if it was sent on behalf of a monitored application using the serial monitor. Because this is a complete software solution, you don’t need to worry much about any additional hardware.

I’m an industrial equipment/repair professional who frequently deals with old PLCs, and I’ve found Serial Port Monitor to be an invaluable tool for troubleshooting serial communications. When it comes to diagnosing and resolving issues in these systems, having a reliable and feature-rich tool like Serial Port Monitor is essential.

Here is a review of what I did during the trial period reverse engineering and debugging modbus diesel generator controller and relay boards for my amateur radio station.

Using Electronic Team’s Serial Port Monitor has been extremely useful in debugging and reverse engineering cheaper modbus equipment for control and automation using node-red. The cheaper hardware usually comes without any documentation at all, but in some cases with demo programs. Running Serial Port Monitor, hooks into the actual serial port without any problems or need for virtual ports. And multiple views for presenting the data. Another very useful feature is to save the session. So when equipment is connected to network gateways, I can always go back to my recordings to verify what actually happened. Also works nice with Moxa serial port servers, and the open port and monitor function lets me remotely debug in the real gateway driven bus, comparing data with working saved session. I have not found any tool as easy and versatile as this for rs-232, and rs-485 modbus monitoring.