Troubleshooting > Serial port already open

This is a common and essentially unavoidable problem that occurs when connecting a digital weight indicator to the serial port on a PC running Windows. So what is the problem? It's rather simple: when the PC starts Windows detects the data from the scale as a serial mouse and loads a driver 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 ScaleDisplay, click the Settings tab, 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:

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