Hi. I'm trying to use USB serial for debugging. Mbed's firmware is upgraded to the last version; my system is Windows XP with SP3.

I copied a simple USB serial code, compiled it and copied on MSD mbed. Reset and reflashed. With PLUGGED mbed I'm trying to install the serial drivers, according to instructions. All windows are closed, explorer, google, etc.

When I execute mbedWinSerial_16466.exe there is the cursor hourglass for a second, then the screen refreshes. Nothing else. No messages, nor installation. The Serial port is not recognized even if I continue to see the mbed as removable hard drive.

1) What am I doing wrong?

2) If it works, is mbed seen as composite device Virtual Com Port+MSD? or is it necessary to switch it to Virtual Com Port mode doing some magics?

Thank you for any help you can give me

Alessandro

Hi Alessandro,

What you are doing sounds correct. When you run the serial driver installer on windows, it should add the USB Serial support (MSD becomes Composite+MSD+Virtual Com).

It sounds like you don't even get a first installer dialog, which suggests the program is being aborted very early for some reason. Off the top of my head, perhaps see if there is a right-click option for "Run as administrator" or alike; although I haven't seen it with our installer (it should check this sort of thing), it could give that sort of behaviour perhaps.

Otherwise, this does sound very strange - if you continue to have problems we'll perhaps get you to try a debug build or alike to see if we can track it down.

Simon

Thank you Simon for your quick answer.

I just installed the drivers on XP Home 2002, SP3 and they work perfectly.

I will try to remove any "strange" device on my main PC (XP Pro 2002, SP3) to check if there are some incompatibilities.

I will let you know about any news.

The debug build is a great idea. If the code is open I could build it myself and check what's wrong,

Have a nice day

Alessandro

Simon, I found a workaround.

I dezipped mbedWinSerial in a folder and setup.exe didn't work as before.

I tried to change every "compatibility" feature of setup.exe till I saw that checking "Disable themes" it runs (my XP is Italian version: I don't know what is the proper English translation).

It could be given by my graphics card barebone configuration: I switched off every nice animation/effect in XP menus because I prefer speed to (unuseful) niceness. Perhaps something in your app is clashing with this.

Thank you anyway!

Happy Easter everybody

Alessandro