Specifications

BATS AND PORTABLE BATS OPERATION
3-9
Technical Note:
A software function within Trackman called TrakComX (aka a 'WinPort'), handles both Serial Ports
and Sockets, each WinPort can handle a single Serial Port or Socket. Due to hardware constraints
in Windows, if a Serial Port is already in use by an existing copy of WinPort an attempt to create a
new copy using the same Serial Port will fail. This means that two copies of WinPort can NOT share
a Serial Port!
Unfortunately, since many of the "devices" that we want to connect to are in fact individual pieces
of hardware, they often share a common serial or network "bus" with many different style packets
from the different "devices" running down the same wire. This means that some of the different
"devices" we are trying to connect to may be on the same Serial Port such that if we were to try
and use a separate copy of WinPort for each copy of TrakComX on that Serial Port all but the first
one will fail.
Our way around this is to manage a 'pool' of WinPorts that allow copies of TrakComX, that require
the same Serial Port, to share a copy of WinPort. Each time a TrakComX copy is created, the "pool"
is checked to see if an existing copy of WinPort is already handling the new TrakComX copy's de-
sired Serial Port, and if so, the existing WinPort is 'shared' by the new copy of TrakComX.