Findcoms: Find the COM port of Arduinos and use it in a makefile

John Peck
Published

My AVR-based Arduino workflow is automated by GNU makefiles, which call avrdude to interact with the hardware. It's nice to also have the makefile find the Virtual COM Port (VCP) assigned to the hardware programmer or USB/UART device. Findcoms is a Tcl script that finds the device and writes the VCP name to a file. You can then access this file from your makefile to get the name to avrdude.

From the command line

Findcoms uses a -d parameter to decide which device to detect. Use -d? to get a list of available d parameters.

list of d params

Use the pololu_isp parameter to detect the Pololu USB AVR Programmer v2 — a very nice device that can program the flash on an ATmega2560.

pololu detection

Take a look at the GitLab repo for more details.