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Hallo all.

I am trying to open a serial port on Mac version of serial port. What does assign serial means in serialtool?
I mean, what is the measning of assiging a serial port number? I am a bit confused.

Hallo 4blondes2nite,

Good to hear that you are running SerialTool on MacOS which is great as SerialTool is one of the most completed serial port software for MacOS.
SerialTool is a multi serial port software which means that you can open multiple serial ports at the same time.
On MacOS the serial port is listed (like Linux) as a file descriptor avaialble of your files list.
On Windows serial ports are all assigned as COMX where X goes from 1 to 256.
That being said you can decide which Serial Port you want to connect to.
SerialTool allows you on free version to manage up to 2 serial communication ports simultaneously.
Let's assume that yo have 3 serial ports on your Mac. You can handle two of them using the same instace of SerialTool software.

Now... Mac PC usually have bluetooth device which is recognized as a serial port but it is not usually used. Then you might have 2 serial com port adaptors which are converting USB to COM port.
Those two serials are listed for example as:
/usb_to_serial_converter_1a1b1c
/usb_to_serial_converter_ aabbcc

At this point you can assing the /usb_to_serial_converter_1a1b1c to serial 1 and /usb_to_serial_converter_ aabbcc to serial 2.

This is just an internal and virtual assignment to tell SerialTool which serial com port adapted has to be used as serial 1 and serial 2.

Once assigned the serial port can be opened and all extra functions like Alarms, Autoanswer etc are taking the serial 1 and serial 2 as targets for your activity.

In this way you can define which serial port you want to communicate with in the case you have more than one serial port handled with a single SerialTool software instance.

On the other side even if you have just 1 serial port on your PC which is detected in the Serial Port Scanning process you still need to assign that serial number. This is because even if you have only one serial you still need to assign it to be able to use it the way you want it.

This simple concept of serial port assignment is needed whenever you want to use multiple serial ports at the same time running SerialTool.

It might sound confusing at first glance but when you unserstand and get familiar with SerialTool usage you will appreciate it and it will become simple and user friendly.

Handling multiple serial ports with a single software is not as simple and easy as it seems from the developing side.

I hope this clarified a but more the way that SerialTool handles multiple serial ports.

Thanks for asking.