com-com

A smart CLI tool for identifying, monitoring, and managing Arduino and microcontroller COM/serial ports.

Features

• Detect connected Arduino boards and other microcontrollers by VID/PID
• Real-time watch mode — see devices connect and disconnect live
• Assign friendly nicknames to ports
• View full connection history with timestamps and uptime
• Export device list to JSON, CSV, or table format
• Copy a port name to clipboard interactively

Supported boards

Arduino (Uno, Mega, Leonardo, Nano, MKR, Nano 33 BLE, Uno R4...), ESP32 / CP210x, FTDI, STM32, Teensy, Adafruit Feather/Metro, Raspberry Pi Pico, Seeed XIAO, SparkFun Pro Micro, BBC micro:bit, WCH CH340/CH341 clones, and more.

Installation

From source (requires Rust)

cargo install --path .

Or install directly from crates.io once published:

cargo install com-com

Windows — linker setup

Rust on Windows needs a linker. Pick one:

Option A — MSVC (recommended): Install Build Tools for Visual Studio with the "Desktop development with C++" workload, then:

rustup default stable-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc

Option B — GNU via MSYS2:

1. Install MSYS2
2. In an MSYS2 MinGW64 terminal: pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc
3. Add C:\msys64\mingw64\bin to your system PATH
4. rustup default stable-x86_64-pc-windows-gnu

If MSYS2 is not on your PATH, uncomment the linker block in .cargo/config.toml and point it at your GCC installation.

Linux

No extra steps — cargo build works out of the box.

You may need libudev for the serialport crate:

# Debian/Ubuntu
sudo apt install libudev-dev

# Fedora/RHEL
sudo dnf install systemd-devel

macOS

No extra steps — cargo build works out of the box.

Usage

# List connected Arduino/MCU devices
com-com

# Show all serial ports (including PCI, Bluetooth, unknown)
com-com --all

# Real-time watch mode (Ctrl+C to stop)
com-com --watch

# Show connection history (last 24 hours by default)
com-com --history

# Show history for the last 7 days
com-com --history --days 7

# Show devices disconnected in the last 30 minutes
com-com --show-recent

# Verbose output (serial number, product string)
com-com --verbose

# Assign a nickname to a port
com-com --nickname COM3 "main-board"       # Windows
com-com --nickname /dev/ttyUSB0 "sensor"  # Linux/macOS

# Remove a nickname
com-com --remove-nickname COM3

# List all saved nicknames
com-com --list-nicknames

# Interactively copy a port name to clipboard
com-com --copy

# Export to JSON or CSV
com-com --export json
com-com --export csv
com-com --export json --output devices.json
com-com --export csv  --output devices.csv --include-timestamps

# Filter to only known MCU boards or only unknown USB serial devices
com-com --filter arduino
com-com --filter generic

# Adjust watch polling interval (milliseconds)
com-com --watch --interval 500

# Clear all saved connection history
com-com --clear-history

Data storage

All persistent data lives in your OS application data directory:

Files:

• config.json — saved nicknames
• session.json — current session connection timestamps
• history.json — full connection/disconnection event log

Contributing

Pull requests are welcome. To get started:

git clone https://github.com/venkata-sai-vishwanath-robo/com-com
cd com-com
cargo build
cargo run -- --help

To add board support, edit the KNOWN_VIDS and BOARD_NAMES tables in src/detection.rs.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.