Serial Port Drivers (Compact 7)
3/12/2014
Learn about adding support for serial port drivers to the Windows Embedded Compact 7 OS, plus links to references and samples.
The serial port driver handles any I/O devices that behave like serial ports, including those based on 16450 and 16550 universal asynchronous receiver-transmitter (UART) chips, and those that use direct memory access (DMA).
You can use the serial port driver to do the following:
- Open, close, and manipulate serial ports.
- Transmit and receive data.
- Manage the serial port connection.
You can use two different methods to create drivers for serial devices:
- Create a stream interface driver dynamic-link library (DLL) that presents high-level information from the device to user applications.
- Have the applications that use the serial device interpret the device data directly.
To enable serial port driver support in your Windows Embedded Compact-based OS design, you can select from one of the serial port driver catalog items provided with Windows Embedded Compact, or you can develop a customized serial port driver to enable Windows Embedded Compact to support a custom serial device.
To add this feature to your OS, see Serial Port Driver Catalog Items.
For reference information, see Serial Port Driver Reference.
Sample application code is available at the following locations.
- %_WINCEROOT%\Public\Common\Oak\Drivers\Serial\COM16550
Lower layer.
- %_WINCEROOT%\Public\Common\Oak\Drivers\Serial\COM_MDD2
Upper layer that addresses transmission performance in the Windows CE .NET 4.2 and earlier serial port driver upper layer, but requires some modifications to existing lower layers.
- %_WINCEROOT%\Public\Common\Oak\Drivers\Serial\ISR16550
Sample installable ISR for the SER16550 serial library.
- %_WINCEROOT%\Public\Common\Oak\Drivers\Serial\OO16550
Serial driver PDD 16550 common code.
- %_WINCEROOT%\Public\Common\Oak\Drivers\Serial\SER16550
Library for supporting 16550-compatible UARTs is included. The lower layers use this.
- %_WINCEROOT%\Public\Common\OAK\Drivers\Serial\Serpddcm
Serial driver PDD common code.
- %_WINCEROOT%\Public\Common\OAK\Drivers\USBFN\Class\Serial
USB function serial client driver
For information about Windows Embedded Compact Test Kit (CTK) tests that apply to this type of driver, see Serial Port Driver BVT.