Virtual Serial Port

Overview

It implements the standard Niagara serial port interface, so drivers address it exactly as they address COM1, whether they are ours, Tridium's, or a third party's. Tested with Modbus RTU, Siemens Apogee P1, and Johnson Controls N2, and most serial drivers work unchanged. Any gateway offering a raw TCP server works, among them Moxa NPort, Lantronix XPort, Digi Connect, Perle IOLAN, Advantech EKI, Atop SE59xx, USR-TCP232, and Schneider EGX. RS-232, RS-422, and RS-485 are all fine, since the electrical side is the gateway's job, and baud rate and parity are set there rather than in Niagara. Ports connect on demand, show their state in the navigation tree, and re-establish themselves after a network interruption without intervention. Devices can sit anywhere the network reaches, including remote sites across a VPN. Runs on a JACE, sitting under the native serial service alongside COM1, and on a Supervisor under its own service. Licensing is perpetual, bound to the Host ID.

List of FAQs

Which serial drivers work with it? Any driver written to the standard Niagara serial port interface, which is nearly all of them. It has been tested with Modbus RTU, Siemens Apogee P1, and Johnson Controls N2, and it is not limited to our own drivers. The honest caveat is timing: a driver that depends on tight turnaround, very high baud rates, or multi-master arbitration can struggle with the latency a network adds. If you are unsure about a particular driver, ask us before you buy. Do I actually need it? Only if the serial port is missing or the cable will not reach. If your JACE has a free RS-485 port and the devices are wired to it, use that port and save the money. This exists for the cases where that is not true. Can a Supervisor talk to serial devices without a JACE? Yes, and that is one of the main uses. A Windows Supervisor or virtual machine has no serial port, so a gateway plus a virtual port lets it reach RS-485 equipment directly. Note that the Supervisor's own Tridium licence needs device and point capacity for field integration, which is a Niagara licensing matter rather than something this module controls. Can I add more serial ports to a JACE? Yes, without buying expansion hardware. Virtual ports appear under the JACE's native serial service next to COM1 and COM2 and are used the same way, so a controller that has run out of physical ports can keep growing. How far away can the serial devices be? Anywhere the IP network reaches. That covers a rooftop or car park at the end of a Wi-Fi or cellular link, a remote plant room, and several sites joined over a VPN with a gateway at each one, all without long serial cable runs or a JACE at every location. Which gateways does it work with? Any serial-to-Ethernet gateway that presents a raw TCP server, including Moxa NPort, Lantronix XPort, Digi Connect, Perle IOLAN, Advantech EKI, Atop SE59xx, USR-TCP232, and Schneider EGX.