Serial retrofit for 30 retail kiosks

Thirty kiosks with RS-232 scanners and receipt printers had to move to new fanless PCs that ship with no serial ports at all.

The setup

A retail chain refreshing 30 kiosks. Each kiosk has a barcode scanner, a receipt printer and a customer display on RS-232. The replacement PCs are fanless industrial units with USB only, and the POS application addresses fixed COM port numbers.

The problem

The POS software was written against fixed COM1–COM3 assignments and could not be rewritten in time for the refresh. Off-the-shelf USB-to-serial adapters renumbered ports depending on which bay the kiosk happened to boot from, so scanners stopped working after a reboot.

What we supplied

We supplied multi-port serial cards with fixed, per-port COM assignment that survives reboots and port reseating, plus industrial USB-to-RS232 adapters for the two kiosks that only needed a single port. Each port keeps its number regardless of enumeration order, so the existing software sees COM1–COM3 exactly as before.

Outcome

All 30 kiosks moved to the new fanless PCs on schedule. COM assignments stayed stable across reboots and across a full hardware swap, and the POS application was not modified.

At a glance

• 30 kiosks refreshed with no POS code changes
• COM numbers stable across reboots and hardware swaps
• Fanless PCs with no onboard serial ports supported