Personal Background: David Coward is a hobbyist electronics enthusiast with a passion for creating new and unusual gadgets. He designs and builds projects, some of which need to communicate to a PC. Some of David’s projects feature in electronics magazines (although he doesn’t plan to have this one published at the moment). As an aside David flies small airplanes.

Victoria Veligodsky: What challenges did you face which made you search for software of this kind?

David Coward: I needed a tool which could capture activity on a PC serial port. This need arose from my electronics project. In this project I use Microchip PIC device to receive SMS messages from a mobile phone, act on these messages and send an SMS back to the user.

All the communications are fast, and the development approach was firstly to get the chip communicating with a PC with the right protocol and then connect it to the phone. A mobile phone and the “Oxygen” program provided a check that the right types of messages were being generated, but the question was “How to compare the two?”

This is where Serial Port Monitor came in. By monitoring firstly the messages between the software and the phone and saving these and then monitoring and saving the messages between the PIC and the phone (and saving these), I could do an easy check that my device was working correctly.

Victoria Veligodsky: How did you found out about Serial Port Monitor Eltima Software?

David Coward: I decided to try searching for the tool I needed using Google. Your Serial Port Monitor was not the only product I found.

Victoria Veligodsky: Did you experiment with other products before choosing this solution and why did you decided to go on with Eltima’s Serial Port Monitor.

David Coward: Yes, I tried a couple of other software products, but they didn’t have an easy and clear user interface and only very primitive ways to save the output. However, I needed a more intelligible product that had more features.

I liked Serial Port Monitor straightaway. Its interface was clean, clear and easy to understand. It did exactly what it said it would do and the flexibility of saving the files for later analysis was very powerful.

Victoria Veligodsky: What are you using our product now for?

David Coward: With Serial Port Monitor I am monitoring the exchanges between the Microchip PIC device and a mobile phone. [Victoria: David succeeded in monitoring serial port and thus in developing his device, as Eltima Software has granted David a free Serial Port Monitor Pro license in gratitude for his participation in this case study]

Victoria Veligodsky: How did you actually benefit from using Serial Port Monitor by Eltima software?

David Coward: Serial Port Monitor allowed the analysis which would be impossible any other way. I was using your product to investigate the protocol which PC software uses to communicate with a mobile phone so I could get my SMS control device to do the same thing.