CREATING A VIRTUAL SERIAL PORT WITH THE 32-BIT MICRO EXPERIMENTER

摘要

The Universal Serial Bus (USB) has made it very simple for end-users to attach peripheral devices to a PC, all but eliminating the myriad of different interconnects that used to be necessary. One such traditional legacy interconnect that is becoming increasingly rare is the RS-232 serial COM port In fact, many modern laptop computers no longer have one. In the Oct 'I I Experimenter article, we stated that legacy communications (i.e., serial port with a PC) are still widely used with microcontrollers. This presents an issue to those applications still needing a serial port on a PC. No worries! With the 32-bit Micro Experimenter, Microchip's USB Firmware stack, and its USB device interface we can provide all the required functionality for a virtual serial port without any additional hardware. This USB serial port is designated as a CDC (Communication Device Class).