I was hoping there was a way to open the serial port and get some info from the board itself. No?
Maybe. But you MUST NOT do so. Active probing of serial ports is a really bad idea, because you don't know what might be connected. Also, for certain types of serial port (bluetooth, tcp, zigbee, etc) merely opening the serial port may take a significant amount of time. Even on actual Arduinos, opening the serial port can/will cause a board-level reset...