Virtual machines (VMs) can be handy for all sorts of reasons; for example, I may need a machine running Windows 7 to support legacy development tools. I can create a VM running Windows 7 on my host machine that’s running Windows 10. Windows 10 comes with Hyper-V (similar to VirtualBox and other virtualization environments) which lets you do this quickly and easily.

However for embedded development, the virtual machine needs to be able to talk to the target and unfortunately, Hyper-V doesn’t directly support mapping virtual COM ports on the VM to physical COM ports on the host machine. Fortunately, Tim Howard wrote a nifty open source utility: COMpipe that lets you do this pretty easily.

To use it, in Hyper-V Manager, select your VM, choose Settings, choose COM1, then named pipe and give the pipe a name (e.g. wm3com10).

Then launch COMpipe on the host machine in a Command window (needs to have administrator privilege), specifying the physical COM port and the named pipe. For example:

COMpipe.exe -b 57600 -c \\.\COM10 -p \\.\pipe\wm3com10

At that point, you should be able to open COM1 in your VM using your favorite serial terminal software (TeraTerm, PuTTY, whatever) and communicate with the device that’s actually connected to COM10 on your host machine. Thanks Tim!!!