Asking here because someone might just know the answer. If not, please point me to an appropriate community.
I have a PLC that needs to talk bidirectionally to a serial (rs232) instrument, but for ‘reasons’ I need a windows computer between them:
PLC -> PC(com1) --PC(com2) -> instrument
I’m thinking that an old school com0com approach may work on the pc, with hub4com joining a real and virtual com port, com0com linking two virtual ports, and another instance of hub4com sending the traffic back out of a real port.
Doors this make sense? Will it work? Is there a better approach? Open source preferred. I could probably write something in python to do it but would rather not.
Is it a requirement that the Windows box needs to be able to interact with the serial stream to/from the PLC and instrument? If it only needs to monitor the serial connection, would it suffice to just have Windows “tap” the RS232 lines to receive the signal but otherwise let it continue, and never TX onto the lines?