7 years, 1 month ago.

mbed Serial port driver question

Hello

I am attempting to connect a large number (66) of mbed devices (Nucleo F303K8) through USB2.0 and access them as serial COM ports on a bare bones Win 7 x64 machine. I've been working with the F303K8 platform over the past year using the STSW-LINK009 driver (http://www.st.com/en/embedded-software/stsw-link009.html).

As I have scaled above 24 F303K8 devices on a single machine I have encountered semi-random communication failures. The mbed COM port is visible, I can open a serial port connection but am not able to receive data that the F303K8 is sending. I've discussed the problem with a serial communications expert who believes my approach is sound but suspects that there is a bug in the mbed serial driver.

Looking into the mbed serial driver has led me to the following: https://developer.mbed.org/handbook/Windows-serial-configuration and associated discussions (https://developer.mbed.org/forum/bugs-suggestions/topic/1186/?page=1#comment-16745 seems particularly relevant but wasn't able to solve my problem).

I have tried wiping my hard disk and restarting the process with the mbedWinSerial_16466 driver. However, I encounter and have been unable to solve the "No mbed Microcontrollers were found" problem. When I first connect the Nucleo Windows identifies it as an "ST-Link Debug" device. When I try to override the driver Windows tells me either that "WPD FileSystem Volume Driver" is correct and up to date or that the mbedSerial_x64.inf file in the mbedWinSerial_16466 package are not compatible with my system (the same error is given for the other *.inf files as well).

Three questions:

1. Is the Serial driver in the STSW-LINK009 package actually different than the mbedWinSerial_16466 driver?

2. How do I get Windows to see the F303K8 Nucleo as an "mbed Serial Port" rather than an "ST-Link Debug"?

3. Any other suggestions?

Thank you very much!