How can I identify COM port devices on Windows

2 min readJan 12, 2022

I am working on several projects that involve using Arduinos and other serial connected devices with a MATLAB GUI. I have a solution for identifying the devices that opens all the COM ports one at a time and queries them. By checking the responses I can identify which devices are connected to which COM ports. This only works if the devices have unique responses to the query sent. I am currently using *IDN? as my query because it seems to be fairly standard. Of course, to interact with the Arduinos, I have to make sure they respond to this query in a predictable way.

My problem is that this process is fairly slow and a little error prone. In Windows Device Manager, each Port is identified by name and COM number. Is there any way to get these names inside of MATLAB? I want to be able to ID the ports without having to open connections to them all.

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It will only work on Windows (7 for sure but maybe not others). I use DOS commands to query the registry in two places to identify which COM ports are connected and then check the USB section of the CurrentContrlSet to match up friendly names.

My code my not be completely optimized but it runs in about .1 seconds so it suits my purposes.

The result is a cell array with friendly names and COM number pairs for each connected USB-serial device that has a friendly name.

Code posted below:

Skey = 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\HARDWARE\DEVICEMAP\SERIALCOMM';
% Find connected serial devices and clean up the output
[~, list] = dos(['REG QUERY ' Skey]);
list = strread(list,'%s','delimiter',' ');
coms = 0;
for i = 1:numel(list)
  if strcmp(list{i}(1:3),'COM')
      if ~iscell(coms)
          coms = list(i);
      else
          coms{end+1} = list{i};
      end
  end
end

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