Settings > Scale > Troubleshooting > Serial port already open

This is a common and essentially unavoidable situation that occurs when connecting a digital weight indicator to the serial port on a PC running Windows.

So what is happening? It's rather simple: when the PC starts Windows detects the data from the scale and assumes it serial mouse. Windows then loads a driver that opens the port which makes the port unavailable to other applications. The solution is rather simple as well: disable the serial mouse.

Disabling the serial mouse

To avoid this problem the serial mouse must be disabled using the Windows Device Manager. To open Device Manager, start Dispatch, click the Settings tile, select System and then click the Device Manager push button.

Locate the group labeled Mice and Other Pointing Devices. Click the + to expand the group. Position the mouse cursor over the item labeled Microsoft Serial or Ball-point mouse and right-click. When the pop-up menu appears, select Disable.

External references

Here are a number of external links describing the issue and with similar solutions. Our apologies if any of the links become unavailable because of changes:

https://www.taltech.com/support/entry/windows_2000_nt_serial_mice_and_missing_com_port

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9226082/device-misdetected-as-serial-mouse

http://www.realgeek.com/forums/serial-port-locks-when-windows-boots-181883.html

http://www.taiwanscale.com/T-News/en/0908/scale-e.html#20

http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=273241.5;wap2

Sharing a serial port

Anothger possibility is that you have more than one application that needs access to the same serial port. If you have more than one application the need access to a single serial port, there are software solutions that allow you to share access to a single serial port.

https://www.fabulatech.com/serial-port-splitter.html