#TN044

 #Summary   

USB to serial converter is not working (Euronav supplied or third party)

Most laptops/PC's are no longer supplied with a built in serial port, and a separate USB to serial converter is required. The USB to serial converters require a driver to be installed.

1. Installing the USB to serial converter
Instructions and drivers will have been supplied with the USB to serial device, follow the instructions that came with the device.

If you have lost the driver and are running Vista or Windows 7/8 and the PC is connected to the internet, the PC will attempt to download the latest driver when you plug the USB to serial in.

Note:
Drivers for XP are unlikely to work with later versions of Windows such as Vista or Windows 7/8 and 32 bit drivers will not work with 64 bit systems.

Some common USB to serial drivers are available on the seaPro DVD in the folder Hardware drivers\USB_SERIAL_Converters
or they can be downloaded from here

Note: These are not guaranteed to work, but as many USB to serial devices use generic electronics its worth a try if you do not have the original drivers. No tech support is available for theses drivers.

2. Setting up the serial ports
Once the drivers are installed, connect up the required NMEA/serial devices such as GPS, Navtex etc., start seaPro and open the seaPro serial port settings. Use the auto-scan to look for and set up the serial port. If seaPro can't find any serial ports then check in the Windows device manager (from control panel) that the device drivers have been installed.

If you don't have have any NMEA data connected to the serial ports the auto-scan might not be able to detect the required serial ports, and will select whatever is available. This may include unsuitable serial ports such as as infra red , modem or Bluetooth ports. If it does, then manually deselect these in the serial settings, or run Auto-scan again with NMEA data connected.

Alternatively you can manually set up (or modify) the serial port settings. Use the Refresh button on the far right of the serial settings dialog to see available com ports.

Note: If you plug the USB/Serial converter into a different USB socket, it will be assigned a different com port. To avoid having to run the seaPro serial setup, try and plug the device into the same port each time.
If using more than one device a useful trick is to use a small USB Hub for the devices (and dongle) and plug these into a single USB socket.