Get Available COM PORT

Get available COM port on your PC

Description

This function output a cell array with string name of each COM port available on your PC.

Example:
 COM_Port = getAvailableComPort();

Enjoy.

• Acknowledgements: This submission has inspired the following:; CO2gui - lab control and automation
• MATLAB release: MATLAB 7.0.1 (R14SP1)

[anders granstroem]

Shows available COM ports. When terminating a matlab program with CTRL-C. Windows 2000 thinks that the com port is occupied. Nice to se this in matlab. Can be seen by doing "mode" command at the command promt in windows as well.

[Marko Antila]

Nice work Daniel - clever to catch the error message. I was thinking this myself but did not have time to work it out.

I think, however that the code could be further improved by inserting these two lines after the first "end":
fclose(s);
delete(s);

This removes the unnecessary handle and does not confuse the future operations with the serial port.

[Geoffrey Akien]

Very handy utility, but unfortunately the way MATLAB finds these serial ports does not take into account if other programs are using them - although fopen will of course prevent you from using that port. Also, when I incorporated it into a GUI, it did not stand up to being run a second time - it could not access the error message which instead replies with a 0x1 structure.