Introduction

Serial Port Notifier (formerly Serial Port Monitor) is a utility that sits in your notification tray and monitors the serial ports on your computer. When a port is added or removed, a notification is shown containing the COM port name, allowing you to easily keep track of what’s been plugged in and out. This saves having to navigate to Device Manager to figure out what’s been plugged in. Program launchers can be defined that allow programs to be quickly started using the selected serial port. Custom labels can also be added to ports to allow for easy identification.

A notification message is displayed when a port is added or removed.
Right-clicking on the tray icon brings up a list of serial ports in the order that they were added. Programs can be quickly launched using the selected port.
The settings dialog showing multiple defined launchers.
The Launcher dialog allowing new launchers to be defined.
A custom label can be added to a port, making it easier to identify.

Download

Serial Port Notifier can be downloaded from the project’s SourceForge page.

Support

If you have any problems, please post a message on the SourceForge Serial Port Notifier Forums.

This Post Has 33 Comments

  1. Svens Jegorovs

    Hello,
    I have installed your tool under Windows 8.1 Prof. Edition and wind an Icon in the System Tray. I see the available ComPorts but I do not see any window with the data traffic on the port. What do I wrong?

    Best regards From Lübeck-Travemünde / Germany Baltic Sea
    Svens

    1. Amr Bekhit

      Hi Svens,

      I think you may be confusing another program with the same name. This software is designed just to show the COM ports that are plugged in to the computer. It doesn’t actually monitor the traffic passing through.

  2. Mike Massen

    Thanks for this it has a use for alerting com port changes. I see it doesnt at present monitor activity. It would be most useful to show some minimal signon type activity with limits of course so the program does not get bloated. ie When attaching a new device such as a usb emulator for a cpu or fpga some note of initial com activity would be a low impost addition if at least to alert and warn of “something going” especially as to then open a further program to monitor can miss the initial activity…
    Thanks will try this out on couple of lab setups, cheers

    1. Amr Bekhit

      Thanks for the feedback Mike. I’ll see if I can implement your suggestions.

    1. Amr Bekhit

      That’s a good idea – I’ll have a look at integrating something like that in.

  3. Xeon

    Dude my hero,
    needed this too long.

  4. JC

    This is a most excellent utility. One addition I’d love to see is the ability to assign a text label to a COM port. I have 17 active devices COM devices, and I have to keep a written list to remember that COM72 to assigned to device X, COM73 is device Y, etc.

    1. Amr Bekhit

      That’s a great suggestion – I’ll try and add it in.

    2. zj

      Came here to make this exact comment! Would love the ability to do this.

      1. Amr Bekhit

        I’m happy to announce this feature has now been implemented! Please download the latest version and give it a try.

    3. Amr Bekhit

      I’m happy to announce this feature has now been implemented! Please download the latest version and give it a try.

  5. Chris K

    Great program. There appears to be some incompatibility with the Silabs CP2102 driver (WIN10 Pro). It properly identifies the port creation but in the port list there is a string of Chinese characters after the port name which are transferred as the COM port name passed to a launcher. Problem looks like at the Silabs end but could be worked round by cleaning up the port name/string so it can only be of the form COMxxx.

      1. Chris K

        Yes, look fine in device manager, enumerates as “Silicon Labs CP210x USB to UART bridge (COM3)”, and the notification refers to COM3 without the extra characters. Seems fine with all other serial bridges I could test (PL2303, CH340, FTDI, PC Internal COM Port, & Bluetooth Serial) so it seems like a quirk of the Silabs driver. BTW, this is the default driver that Windows finds.

        I’ve just installed the drivers SiLabs post in their web site. These are newer (dated 27 March this year) and the problem seems to go away so I guess it was a problem their end . Doh! should have thought of that first 🙁

  6. Chris K

    Reading the Silabs release notes I suspect it could have been something to do with

    Changes for VCP Driver
    ==============================================================================
    MCUSW-473 | Fix length of nul-terminated legacy Dos Name string written to
    | HARDWARE\DEVICEMAP\SERIALCOMM Registry key.

    1. Chris K

      FYI, just tried it on a machine that had not had one of these devices plugged in before and can confirm that Windows Update serves the latest driver that does not display the issue. Thanks for the response though.

  7. dondario

    I accedently added a ” in the settings for a new terminal program.

    Now the Program shows an Error messange: “Illegales Zeichen im Pfad” when I enter the settings dialog.
    But the defective entry is not shown in the dialog, so I am not able to delete it.
    Where is the configuration stored, so that i can delete the entry manually?
    Thanks in advance,

    Dario

    1. Amr Bekhit

      Thanks for letting me know. I’ll take a look and see if I can prevent this from happening in the first place.

  8. dondario

    Just found the Konfig file:

    c:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Helm_PCB\Serial_Port_Monitor.exe_Url_nw4x32fokrxu0ijd0ht2lhhrb3xxzggx\1.1.2.0\user.config

    1. Amr Bekhit

      I’ve updated Serial Port Notifier to validate the program path when you try and save a launcher. The program will now prevent invalid characters from being saved in the launcher, which should prevent the problem you faced. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

  9. netprince

    It is a wonderful tool and help me a lot. I have looked for it for a long time. Thank you very much.
    BTW, could it shows the title of the port as it is in device manager?
    The titles shown in device manager like below:
    > Ports(COM & LPT)
    > JLink CDC UART Port (COM6)
    > USB Serial Port (COM8)

  10. Lonnie

    I love this, excellent work!

  11. Oscar

    It would be very helpful if besides name for a port you could also define some other strings, and access those strings when creating a launcher by %3 %4 and so on.
    This way you could add a port specific argument to a launcher command. I have this need where some ports I have are of one type and some are of another type and I need to pass different parameters to a launched program (for example baud rate or some other option)

    1. Amr Bekhit

      Hello, thanks for your suggestion. What other strings would you want to pass to programs?

      1. Oscar

        Any user defined string that I can assign to a COM port, similar to how you can assign a name to each com port, these strings would be assigned to a com port and could be accessed using %number in the launcher. so if I assign COM1 a single string with value 115200 I can make a launcher like this: serialtool –port=%1 –baudrate=%3

  12. Marc

    Very useful, thanks !

  13. Johnnie

    Thank you for this utility. It is just what I wanted to identify port numbers when using USB to serial adapters without having to open Device Manager.

  14. GKG

    I am ready to temporarily uninstall for testing and I can’t. The program is running in the tray but does not show up in the installed apps list and can’t be accessed by add/remove program.

    1. Amr Bekhit

      It sounds like maybe the installation has failed half way. Have you tried running the installer again, or manually deleting the executable and its files from the program files folder first and then running the installer again?

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