Serial Wombat
a general-purpose digital interface device for hobbyists, engineers and students

Did you know...

Introduction

The WombatPortBridge is designed to allow two things:

• Allow the access of a Serial Wombat chip from a computer other than the one to which it is attached
• Allow programming languages which have better support for Sockets than Serial Ports to more easily access the Serial Wombat.

This application is very simple: It's basically an RS-232 to Ethernet Converter, with a big computer in the middle. It prompts the user to enter IP port and Serial Port settings, then serves a Socket and opens the Serial Port. Anything that comes in from the Socket gets sent out the Serial Port. Anything that comes in from the Serial Port gets sent out the Socket. Pretty Simple huh?

Strictly speaking, this app doesn't have anything to do specifically with the Wombat, since you could use it to access any serial device, but here it is anyway...

Let me warn you from the start, I'm an inexperienced Windows Programmer. I spend my days writing embedded systems software, mostly in C and assembly for devices which don't have a graphic user interface. If you have constructive criticisms of how I've designed and written this application, I'd love to hear them. Please use the contact page on this site. Since this program opens ports on your computer it's possible, perhaps likely, that malintentioned people could do all sorts of horrible things to your computer by exploiting flaws that I don't know are in my software. Use at your own risk.

When you launch the app, you'll get a configuration form:

Com Port and Baud Rate should be self-explanatory. The Serial Port will open with 8-N-1 settings, and no flow control.

The IP Port number is the port which will be used. Any client applications should open this port.

Timeout is the number of seconds between received bytes before which the connection should be assumed lost. 0 means that a connection is never assumed lost.

Use Internet IP Address will determine whether a network address (Such as 192.168.1.100) should be used (if checked) or the localhost address (127.0.0.1) should be used (if not checked).

Once you press OK, you'll see the main window:

When a connection exists, the IP address of the connected client will appear. The total number of bytes sent in each direction is displayed.

To end a connection, close the application.

A simple test of this app can be performed with the telnet client which comes with Windows (choose run from the start menu):

Note that Telnet isn't really the best app to use, since it implements the Telnet terminal protocol on top of the raw TCP/IP connection. Better to test using a terminal capable of a Raw connection, but I don't think this is possible with the basic apps included with Windows. Wikipedia's article on Telnet mentions a few different terminals with this capability.

The Application

You can download this application, its source, an installer, and this documentation in a zip file. You can run it right out of the "release"directory (a couple down from the top) or install it on your start menu from the "publish" directory.