Make it easier to use port 10 as a serial port

[Mads]

In short:

If the code tries to initialize and use port 10 as a serial port it should work without any issues as long as the hardware indeed supports this.

Background:

By default VISA will associate ASRL 10 with parallel ports and you have to manually modify the visaconf.ini file to be able to use it as a serial port instead. This is very cumbersome and not very intuitive for the users (if a serial port is installed and grabs port 10 (the fact that it can and will do this is alone a reason not to have the current behaviour) they do not understand why it does not work).

Serial ports are still quite common compared to parallel ports, if VISA has to dedicate an alias to parallel ports like this it makes more sense to choose a number less likely to conflict with serial ports - like COM99 or higher..

[Darren]

Any idea that has received less than 2 kudos within 2 years after posting will be automatically declined. 

[Mads]

Hopefully the number of support requests NI receive caused by this will spark a change some day...although now it probably will not, as most people will be able to find the info necessary to bypass the issue so quickly that they forget to complain about the existence of the problem....

(The only reason I bothered is that with thousands of users, and no ni.com equivalent readily available for them (most of them are forced to be offline), the issue does pop up every now and then. And in our case the cost of each case is sufficient for it to become a nuisance. We can reduce this of course by covering the issue in our own user manuals etc, but the most permanent solution would be if the fundamental issue was removed).

- That's a problem in general with issues that are possible to bypass easily once you know how. It's easy nowadays to figure things out using the web, so even though there indeed is an issue, the problem feedback will stay low (web page visit monitoring could perhaps reveal some of these issues, but most likely the information would drown in other significant signals/noise).

[TomOrr0W]

Is this still a common issue?  I don't remember having to change visaconf.ini on a set of testers that use ports COM3-COM12 as serial ports.

Mads' most recent response would have been late in the 15.x VISA versions, while these testers are VISA 17.5.

[Mads]

Looks like you are right TomOrr0W, at least there is no LPT1 mapping in my 2018 system.

That was the problem earlier - that VISA by default had LPT1 (parallell port) mapped as serial port 10 - as described here: https://forums.ni.com/t5/Measurement-Studio-for-NET/Is-COM10-Serial-Port-accessible-using-VISA-Seria...

So maybe the idea was not declined after all (well, most likely it was covered by changes that had happened anyway...):smileyhappy: