[BRLTTY] searching for correct port

[Nicholas Dechman]

I am working on a student assessment system for students with various disabilities.  In order to address the needs of blind students, I have been using BrlTTY because of its ability to interface with many different braille displays.  The idea is that a student will either use their own braille display or one provided by their school district to take a test using this system.

Among many other refreshable braille displays, I have been using an APEX BrailleNote for some time.  BrlTTY is configured to talk to it using:
braille-device: serial:COM3

This works just dandy.  However, it has become apparent that, although a large portion of students use this BrailleNote device every day, many of them have never used it as a braille terminal -- and why would they?  It's basically a computer.  But for the purposes of this test, we need them to use the braille terminal interface feature.

So, since many students who use this device are not likely to be familiar with BrlTTY, they are probably not ready to be looking through the device manager to find the com port the APEX is hooked up to, and they are probably not ready to go mucking about in the brltty.conf file to put the right com port in there.  And, frankly, I don't think many of their teachers are ready for that either.

The installer I built for this assessment is smart enough to configure BrlTTY for usb devices, but the serial port configuration is beyond what I am able to do in an installer.

So... with all that long preamble, here is the question I want to ask:

Can I search programmatically for the serial port the APEX is hooked to?

Ideally, I'd love it if BrlTTY could find the com port for me.

Failing that, I'd like to write a batch file or something that polls the com ports looking for which one is the APEX.

Has anyone written anything like this?

-Nick
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