From the Windows mbed serial driver install instructions:

"If you have multiple mbed microcontrollers, but the serial port only appears for one of them:

• Make sure you run the installer for every mbed; windows loads the driver based on the serial number, so it needs to be run for each mbed you use"

Does it really have to check and lock to an individual serial number and not just the typical USB PID/VID code that is common for each board type?

Any idea on how to easily setup the serial virtual com port driver for large student labs in schools where large numbers of mbeds will be moved around to any of a large number of PCs. Right now I have 26 mbed modules and 200 PCs! We Ghost PC's disk images, but still have around 10 different PC image types to deal with in different lab rooms. So something like 260 driver installs would be needed plugging in all of the boards one at a time - a bit ugly!

We don't give students admin rights to install their own software in open PC labs. If you do that they will kill off most of the PCs in a week installing all kinds of strange stuff.

Also, it looks like each board uses another com port number. I also have some concerns there might be a limit on the number of virtual com ports in Windows - it will certainly add a lot of entries to the registry.

I suppose another approach would be to edit the registry and cut and paste the chunks needed for the mbed driver for all boards onto each of the different types of PCs. Is there any documentation available for the registry entries that the serial driver uses and is it just the typical USB PID/VID load this driver DLL style entry?

Hey Jim,

Wouldn't using a regular serial port with the mbed be a simple fix? As I recall, you can still load programs to the mbed though USB without installing the USB serial driver. It might be a bit of a pain to have two connections to the mbed, but it sure beats installing the driver 260 times..

Yes, but I would also need to give all of the students a Sparkfun RS232 adapter and a serial cable or just tell them to buy one. I guess I could solve it that way by making it the students problem to buy something. As time goes on that might be the solution. I have a few of the PCs setup in one lab, but wide distribution is the issue. The TA did the 26 installs for that PC cluster, but he was not a happy camper. Now I need to explain it to the students so that they select the correct COM port out of 26. Can you have a "COMxx:" with two digits - guess I will find out soon.

I think a couple of the new PC labs might not even have serial - so I might also need USB to serial adapter cables and install the special driver they need (but only once!)

Right now, I also have another mbed setup issue to deal with so that they can use the network. You have to register each NIC address to use our network (Campus wide security policy) and the subnet in our lab area is out of IP addresses to assign.

Somehow I think that it would be easier to do a workaround with the firmware. I don't think fooling around with windows and the registry would help much due to the fact that each board appears at some different com port. Maybe for the next firmware update the mbed guys could have some sort of (optional) config file that deals with the usb-serial interface  to make things easier to set up for such situations.

As for the network issues, a simple solution is to setup a seperate network (i.e vlan) using a seperate router (or a fancy switch). That way the mbeds can be on their own private IP range (i.e 192.168.1.0) and still be able to access the internet through the router/gateway. That way you only have to provision the router MAC address with the campus network and not each mbed. But you've probably already thought of that...

I hope it works out. I am interested in the serial driver solution..