Serial Watcher

Serial Watcher is a lightweight and portable application designed as a simple serial input terminal. It comes packed with a handful of useful settings.

Since installation is not a prerequisite, you can drop the executable file to any location on the hard drive and just click it to run.

It is also possible to save Serial Watcher to a USB flash disk or similar storage unit, in order to run it on any workstation with minimum effort and without previous installers.

What's more, the app does not create new entries in the Windows registry or Start menu, leaving the disk clean after removal.

The interface is made from a regular window with a plain and simple layout, where you can select the port number, data width, stop bits, parity and speed, along with the hardware and software handshake, as well as enable DTR, RTS or both, in order to receive data.

The display mode can be selected between decimal, hexadecimal and ASCII, while information may be saved to a plain text document for further evaluation.

Serial Watcher has minimal impact on computer performance, using very low CPU and RAM. It has a good response time and works well on newer operating systems, although it has not been updated for a pretty long while.

No error dialogs were shown in our testing, and the tool did not hang or crash. We have not come across any issues. Serial Watcher serves its purpose, and its options should please power users.