I'm using a serial device for a project, and what I'm trying to accomplish PC side, is listening for a command sent by the serial device, interpreting the query, running some code depending on the query, and transmitting back the result.
To be honest I tried out using PHP as the listener, and it works, unfortunately the infinite loop required to make the script act as a receiver, loads the CPU to 25%. So it's not really the best option.
I'm using cygwin right now, I'd like to create a bash script using linux native commands.
I can receive data by using:
cat /dev/ttyS2
And send a response with:
echo "command to send" > /dev/ttyS2
My question is, how do I make an automated listener to be able to receive and send data? The main issue I have, is actually how do I stop the cat /dev/ttyS2 command once information was received, put it into a variable which then I could compare with a switch, or a series of if else then blocks. Afterwards send back a response and start the cycle all over again?
Thanks
Is this not what you're looking for?
while read -r line < /dev/ttyS2; do
# $line is the line read, do something with it
echo $result > /dev/ttyS2
done
To remain fairly system independent, use a cross platform programming language: like Python, use a cross platform serial library like : pySerial and do the processing inside a script. I have used pySerial and I could run the script cross platform with almost no changes in source code. By using BASH you're limiting yourself a fair little.
If you use right tools, it is possible to actually have your CPU usage to be exactly 0 when your device does not have any output.
To accomplish this, you should use some higher level language (Perl, Python, C/C++ would do, but not bash) and use select loop on top of file handle of your serial device. This is an example for Perl http://perldoc.perl.org/IO/Select.html, but you can use any other language as long as it has support for select() syscall.
I would recommend to use C/C++ with Qt 5.1.1, it's really easy and if you are familiar with the framework it'll be a piece of cake!!!
Here you can find more information and here more helpful examples, give it a try,
it's really pain free!! Also you can develop on win and then port your code to linux...straight forward.
Declare an object like this:
QSerialPort mPort; //remember to #include <QtSerialPort/QSerialPort>
//also add QT += serialport to your .pro file
Then add this code:
MainWindow::MainWindow(QWidget *parent) : QMainWindow(parent)
{
setupUi(this);
connect(this->pushButton,SIGNAL(clicked()),this,SLOT(sendData()));
mPort.setPortName("ttyS0");
mPort.setBaudRate(QSerialPort::Baud115200);
mPort.setParity(QSerialPort::EvenParity);
if(!mPort.open(QSerialPort::ReadWrite))
{
this->label->setText(tr("unable to open port, %1").arg(mPort.error()));
}
connect(&(this->mPort),SIGNAL(readyRead()),this,SLOT(readData()));
}
void MainWindow::sendData()
{
QByteArray data = lineEdit->text().toLatin1();
if(mPort.isOpen())
{
mPort.write(data);
}
else
{
this->label->setText(tr("port closed %1").arg( mPort.error()));
}
}
void MainWindow::readData()
{
QString newData;
int bread=0;
while(bread < mPort.bytesAvailable() ){
newData += mPort.readAll();
bread++;
}
this->textEdit->insertPlainText("\n" + newData);
}