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TL;DR: Can I have an Airconsole device appear as a "local com port" from a PC that is on a different network instead of having to use telnet or http?

We have several proprietary applications which are used to program equipment in the field via a serial connection. These programs can ONLY connect via a local com port on the PC and won't work with telnet or http. Currently, our users are using a laptop to connect to and program these devices. However, we would prefer to keep a PC in the office with the proprietary software on it for maintenance/privacy/deployment purposes. Is it possible to have an Airconsole appear as a virtual com port on a PC on a completely different network? I assume we would need a private server for this to work.

Hi Ryan,

As long as you have IP connectivity to the Airconsole on the remote network you can make this work (either via WiFi or wired Ethernet).

For a step-by-step guide you can follow section 3. of the instructions here: http://support.get-console.com/solution ... ws-7-8-8-1

Hey Daniel,

Thanks for the quick reply and the link. If I'm reading the included article correctly, I will need to be able to reach the Airconsole directly by IP. Unfortunately, I don't believe that will work for us since the Airconsole will most likely be NAT'd behind whatever router/firewall it is connected to. I won't be able to do any port forwarding/NAT at the Airconsole end of the connection since we don't have any control over those routers (they are customer owned). Essentially, we would need the Airconsole to initiate an outbound connection to an internet facing server on my end of the connection, so that the Airconsole can use any internet connection and reach the PC(s) with a virtual com port.

Our end goal is to eliminate the user laptops and instead have them use an iPad to connect to a Citrix VDI session to do their programming. Since the proprietary software they use is always changing and the computers are almost never on our network, keeping the software up-to-date is nearly impossible (we have over 100 of these laptops in the field and they rarely come into the office).

Maybe I'll have to move this to the feature request section.

Hi Ryan,

The Airconsole can initiate outbound connections which may solve part of your problem; although possibly not the local COM port part.

You can configure the Airconsole to either:
- send all serial port traffic to a Private Server / Airconsole Enterprise Server where you can centrally manage all of your Airconsoles
- connect out via TCP to a telnet server / another Airconsole in Machine-to-Machine mode
- send out the serial data received using UDP to either a unicast or broadcast IP address
Each of these methods will continue to retry connections in the event that the internet is down/unreachable.

For a local Windows COM port you will need a Virtual COM port driver, such as the com0com driver (which is incredibly flexible), or the 3rd party freeware HW Group VSP. Setting up either for use above is somewhat tricky.

As a suggestion, you could try the 2nd option (TCP M2M mode on the Airconsole) and the HWGroup VSP driver in TCP server mode. The Airconsole will then initiate outbound connection from the remote network and (assuming it can get past any firewalling) connect to the listening HWGroup driver on your local network (or forwarded to your local network by a router/firewall under your control). You can then open the COM port on the PC (e.g. COM5, etc) and be tunnelled to the serial port at the remote site. I've never actually tested this works, but in theory it should.

Multiplexing 100s of Airconsoles probably wouldn't work with the HW Group VSP though - surely you don't want 100 COM ports? The new Airconsole Enterprise Server (aka Private Server 2.0) is pretty good at managing large numbers of remote serial ports so might be worth evaluating.

Update: I've just tested this and it works. Windows 7 x64 PC running HW Group VSP in TCP server mode, create local COM3. Connected to COM3 using Putty. Airconsole configured for M2M TCP mode with Windows 7 IP as remote target. Can now access Airconsole serial port via Putty.

There is a slight issue that the M2M TCP client runs in RFC2217 mode - I will add a feature request to get this to optionally run in raw serial (otherwise upon connection the RFC2217 preamble appears as garbage in Putty)

Daniel,

That is awesome! Thanks for taking the time to test! We'll be ordering one to do some testing. This would be a huge improvement for us (the IT team) and the users.