OK, after a lot of research I found a solution. 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
key = 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\USB\';
% Find all installed USB devices entries and clean up the output
[~, vals] = dos(['REG QUERY ' key ' /s /f "FriendlyName" /t "REG_SZ"']);
vals = textscan(vals,'%s','delimiter','\t');
vals = cat(1,vals{:});
out = 0;
% Find all friendly name property entries
for i = 1:numel(vals)
if strcmp(vals{i}(1:min(12,end)),'FriendlyName')
if ~iscell(out)
out = vals(i);
else
out{end+1} = vals{i};
end
end
end
% Compare friendly name entries with connected ports and generate output
for i = 1:numel(coms)
match = strfind(out,[coms{i},')']);
ind = 0;
for j = 1:numel(match)
if ~isempty(match{j})
ind = j;
end
end
if ind ~= 0
com = str2double(coms{i}(4:end));
% Trim the trailing ' (COM##)' from the friendly name - works on ports from 1 to 99
if com > 9
length = 8;
else
length = 7;
end
devs{i,1} = out{ind}(27:end-length);
devs{i,2} = com;
end
end
