title: Reading data from serial port (COM3) using pyserial module on Windows XP
body: <p>Before going into the problem, here is some hardware/software information:</p>
  
  <p>Device accessed: Ohaus Scout Pro Digital Weight Machine (<a href="http://www.northshorecare.com/ohaus-scout-pro.html" rel="nofollow">product link</a>)
  Interface used: USB (<a href="http://www.carolina.com/product/702448.do?s_cid=ppc_gl_products" rel="nofollow">product link</a>)
  Serial Port: COM3
  OS: WinXP
  Python Version: Activestate Python 2.7
  pyserial version: 2.5</p>
  
  <p>Python recognized this serial port and had no problems opening it. I am new to python as  well as pyserial. I couldn't figure out how exactly can I read data from the serial port. I used the following code:</p>
  
  <pre><code>1 import serial
  2 ser=serial.Serial(port='COM3',timeout=3)
  3 s=ser.read(100) #reading up to 100 bytes
  4 print s
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This prints nothing. During those 3 seconds timeout, I placed an object on the weighing machine and it showed 100grams on the machine. But, this data is not showing on the computer. How can I read this data using pyserial?</p>