Vladimir Oltean

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8 years ago.

Windows 10 driver for mbed serial port

Hello,

I have a board with an NXP LPC1768 running ARM mbed firmware (note that due to some technical problems I cannot confirm the exact version). I am connecting to it over an USB-serial connection. My host OS is Windows 10 Home, Version 1511, OS Build 10586.3. Upon plugging the micro USB cable, Windows detects the mbed microcontroller and installs the CMSIS-DAP driver, and Device Manager shows a generic Mass Storage driver being loaded for this microcontroller. A COM device is not exported by Windows and I cannot establish a serial connection to it. After following the steps described here [1], Windows 10 indeed loads this driver over the generic one and the serial connection works as expected. My question is: what is the reason for the note in bold: "Not Required for Windows 10!"? Are there any additional constraints that apply to the Windows 10 version and/or mbed firmware version? I also saw this thread [2] with an answer from Andrea Corrado from Oct 28 that states "indeed will not work with Windows 10, However its not needed! Windows 10 already has a serial driver for the purposes so should work fine". Unfortunately this only adds more to the confusion since my experience has shown otherwise.

Thanks, Vladimir

[1]: https://developer.mbed.org/handbook/Windows-serial-configuration [2]: https://developer.mbed.org/forum/bugs-suggestions/topic/26995/

Hi Vladimir,

Thanks for your feedback really is very much appreciated.

May i ask if you are using 32 bit or 64 bit Windows?

It has been the general case that Windows 10 users have not needed to install the serial driver, therefore I'm keen to understand why in your case this has happened. :)

I can then sort to clean this up for you :)

Regards,

Andrea, team mbed

posted by Andrea Corrado 21 Dec 2016

Hello Andrea,

My Windows is compiled for Intel x86_64. Please let me know if there is any other information I can provide.

Vladimir

posted by Vladimir Oltean 21 Dec 2016

Thanks Vladimir,

I'm going to take note of this and watch to see if others have similar issues.

Further reading on the topic is found here:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/usbcoreblog/2015/07/29/what-is-new-with-serial-in-windows-10/

posted by Andrea Corrado 21 Dec 2016

I too have hit this issue on a clean Windows 10 install. Here is what I have observed so far:

  • Installed Windows 10 Pro in a Parallels VM on my MacBook Air.
    • 64-bit Windows - Version 1607 OS Build 14393.1198
  • I have tried connecting two mbed devices to this clean copy of Windows 10 and the mass storage device mounts but a virtual serial port never shows up in Device Manager.
  • I programmed my mbed-LPC1768 with a USBSerial sample that implements a simple CDC sample using the LPC1768's USB port itself. Windows 10 did recognize the CDC interface on this device and a virtual serial port showed up in Device Manager when it was connected.

From what I see, Windows 10 can automatically mount USB devices with CDC interfaces but it won't do it for the compound USB device descriptors exposed by the mbed interface chips on the devices I have tested with.

posted by Adam Green 16 May 2017

Thanks a lot for looking into this!

posted by Vladimir Oltean 02 Jun 2017

1 Answer

Jenny Plunkett
6 years, 6 months ago.

Hi there,

As noted in the comments above, this issue with Windows 10 should be resolved. Downloads for the latest Mbed Windows serial drivers can be accessed here: https://os.mbed.com/docs/latest/tutorials/windows-serial-driver.html

Please let me know if you have any questions!

- Jenny, team Mbed

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