ABOUT US

Stratus Engineering is a San Diego-based hardware company specializing in passive tap modules for RS-232, RS-422, and RS-485 serial communication. Our products — the EZ-Tap, EZ-Tap Pro, and Versa-Tap — are used by engineers who need to monitor, capture, and analyze serial data without interrupting live connections.

Founded in 1997 by Robert Kirstein, a computer engineer with a B.S. from UC San Diego and decades of experience in embedded systems, digital hardware design, and communications systems, Stratus Engineering was built around a simple idea: serial monitoring hardware should be reliable, passive, and easy to use.

Our Story

We started Stratus the way every engineer-founded company starts: with a problem we couldn't solve with off-the-shelf parts.

Back in the 1980s, monitoring RS-232 communication between two devices meant tapping into the wires by hand and connecting them to a serial port on a PC. The only real problem with that approach was that the soldering would break. Once we were past that, we had a working setup.

"The only real problem with that approach was that the soldering would break."

Then computers started using multi-tasking operating systems. Suddenly the exact timing of events couldn't be determined — the OS would schedule processes whenever it felt like it, and by the time your monitoring application got CPU time, the conversation you cared about was already over. Software-based serial monitoring became unreliable for anything timing-sensitive.

Then came the next problem: it started to be hard to find a computer that had an RS-232 port at all.

We needed a tool that solved all three: didn't depend on soldering, didn't depend on the host OS for timing accuracy, and didn't need an RS-232 port on the PC to plug into. We built one. That became the EZ-Tap — a small passive hardware module that taps the line, captures everything, and connects to any modern PC over USB.

The product line grew from there. EZ-Tap Pro added microsecond hardware time-tagging and handshake-line capture for engineers who needed to see exactly when each byte hit the wire. Versa-Tap extended the same concept to RS-422 and RS-485 — for industrial systems, factory floors, and anything outside the RS-232 world.

We're still based in San Diego. Still small. Still building the tools we wanted to have when we were on the other side of the bench.

No software to install. No interruption to your connection. Just clean, passive serial data capture.

If you need to tap an RS-232 connection without writing a line of code or installing software, you're in the right place.