(I) Programming serial port communications

Connections and operating system symbolic names

A serial port is a communication physical interface through which information  transfers in or out one bit at a time (in contrast to a parallel port) being, more or less compliant, with the RS-232 standard.

But serial port communications aren't only useful for wired DE-9 connectors. it also allows us to use it with USB (ftdi), Bluetooth (serial profile) and Zigbee using virtual serial ports.

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Serial and virtual serial ports appear as  COMx in Windows operating systems (COM1, COM2, ...) andin UNIX/Linux as ttySx or ttyUSBx or even ttyACMx (ttyS0, ttyS1, ttyUSB0, ttyUSB1, ttyACM0, ttyACM1,...).

For programming purposes we usually want to communicate computers with others computers, microcontrollers or other devices like GPS, LED or LCD displays.

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Serial port programming in C/C++, Windows and Linux

Using the serial port is a lot  easier, but sometimes tricky. The basic commands are to open a connection, read and write over this connection and, finally, tom close it, better if using the C++ RAII idiom.

Windows commands:
Here you can find a complete C++ for Windows example.

With these next two definitions (among others needed):

HANDLE serialPortHandle
wchar_t* device

• Opening a connection, CreateFile:

serialPortHandle = CreateFile(device, GENERIC_READ | GENERIC_WRITE, 0, NULL, OPEN_EXISTING, NULL, NULL);

• Reading and writing, ReadFile and WriteFile

if (serialPortHandle!=INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE)
ReadFile(serialPortHandle, buffer, len, &read_nbr, NULL);

...

if (serialPortHandle!=INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE)
WriteFile(serialPortHandle, buffer, len, &result, NULL);

• Closing the connection, CloseHandle

CloseHandle(serialPortHandle);

Unix/Linux commands:
Here you can find a complete C++ for Linux example.

With these two definitions:

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int fileDescriptor;

char *device;

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• Opening a connection, open

struct termios terminalAttributes;

fileDescriptor = open(device, O_RDWR | O_NOCTTY | O_NDELAY | O_FSYNC );

// clear terminalAttributes data
memset(&terminalAttributes, 0, sizeof(struct termios));

terminalAttributes.c_cflag = B57600 | CS8 | CLOCAL | CREAD; 
terminalAttributes.c_iflag = IGNPAR |  ONLCR;
terminalAttributes.c_oflag = OPOST;
terminalAttributes.c_cc[VTIME] = 0;
terminalAttributes.c_cc[VMIN] = 1;

tcsetattr(fileDescriptor, TCSANOW, &terminalAttributes);

• Reading and writing, read and write

int n=read(fileDescriptor, buffer, len);

...

int n=write(fileDescriptor, buffer, len);

• Closing the connection, close

close(fileDescriptor);

More information:


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_communication
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_port

http://www.lvr.com/serport.htm
http://digilander.libero.it/robang/rubrica/serial.htm
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Serial_Programming

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff802693.aspx