That's because Registry key formats are inconsistent. The function below drills down though the relevant part of the registry and filters out values with the desired VID and PID values. NET solution, but will work for the vast majority of My initial attempt used WMI and Win32 classes, but I was not able to find the information needed.

Make a note of the 4 digit numbers of interest, in this case VID is 0403, PID is 6001. A dialog box pops up, select the Details tab and Hardware ID's property. Select the port of interest, in this case COM8, right click and select Properties. Here's what I see on my machine when the Arduino board is plugged in. Open the device manager and expand the list of COM ports. Note that the device must be plugged in to make it visible. The information you need is located in the Device Manager, sometimes in more than one place. The intersection of the 2 lists is the COM port desired. My approach is to compile an array of all COM port numbers that were historically allocated to a particular VID/PID combination.įrom there it is simple to compare the list of COM ports open now to the list of comports that were allocated to the VID/PID.

Most USB serial port devices have unique hardware ID's, so as you plug in more serial devices, each device is then allocated a unique COM port number. The lazy way is to display a list of all knownĬomports and get the user to select the correct one.

It is, however, useful to know for medical devices that communicate using USB.I needed to write an application that interacted with an Arduino board via its COM port. In that sense, the VID/PID combination does not really serve as a truly unique identifier of a single device instance. So, whenever you need a specific driver for your USB product, you will need a unique VID/PID for that product. For this to work, the VID/PID combination must be unique, in the sense that each USB device with the same VID/PID will use the same driver. A host uses the VID/PID combination to find the drivers (if any) that are to be used for the USB device. A PID is a 16-bit product number (Product ID). A VID is a 16-bit vendor number (Vendor ID). See the Directory of published versionsĪ USB device that is plugged in identifies itself by its VID/PID combination. This version is based on the current content of and changes regularly. This is not an authorized publication it is the continuous build for version 5.3.0). HL7 Terminology (THO), published by HL7 International - Vocabulary Work Group.

Usb device VID PID