Been looking into purchasing a second hand computer for a few projects I would like to work on and noticed many people are selling computers that have serial COM ports. I have never used one of these and was wondering what devices they served and if there are any current day uses? They may or may not be outdated but I would be interested to learn more.
I believe they are used by industrial printers. I maybe wrong though as there is also a longer one called Printer port.
I have seen numerous in hospital settings, some I believe are printers. Is there any "fun" or experimental use I could use one for? trying to expand my knowledge as much as possible and the best learning is by doing.....albeit a port haha
It is commonly used to do initial configuration on rack mount network switches and routers.
It can be used for data transfer (if you really want to) as well as the DB25 counter part.
It used to be used a lot. On the old Amiga 600 (and many computers at the time) the DB9 used to be used to connect the mouse and/or a joystick (as it had two ports). Another older use case was the IR communication tower to program the original Lego Mindstorms (RCX).
Most of these use cases have been replace with either USB or Ethernet network solutions
I have a serial port on my work machine, like Zanginator said I mostly use these to setup switches/routers/WAPs. I also use it for older hardware like a serial mouse, pretty neat I believe someone called these the USB ports of yesteryear.
I just use my serial port for setting routers, switches, hubs and WAP's up as well.
I've got an old joystick that still uses a com port... I think I have an old gamepad around here somewhere that uses it as well. Oh, I also have an old mouse with a serial connection and I THINK the old sheetfed scanner in the closet uses it as well. I'm sure there's more legacy parts boxed up in the closet (or in my mom's basement lol) that are serial compatible, but I can't think of any at the moment. So basically nothing that I really use anymore, but they're there if I need em : )
Right now I am trying to fix a industrial machine that is controlled through the serial port of a PC.
I use serial all the time at work. HART, Feildbus and Modbus are used over Serial.
Most industrial transmitters (Pressure, flow, temp, etc...) flow computers and PLCs use it.
There is a reason that Toughbooks and similar laptops all retain it.
http://www.yokogawa.com/us/
http://www.abb.com/
http://www2.emersonprocess.com/en-us/brands/rosemount/Pages/index.aspx
www.schneider-electric.com/
www.ab.com/
www.siemens.com/
Just a small taste of the world of automation and instrumentation
Electronics 'folk use[d] them for seriall firmware programming. This is falling by the wayside with the ubiquitous availablility of usb->uart serial trasceivers. Something like the ft232r turns a usb port directly into a com port. You can even buy a usb cable with one of these embedded in the usb plug.
you can use them to program and diagnose car computers