writing to serial port from linux command line

Question

From windows I can communicate with a serial port device using following commands:

mode com1: baud=9600 data=8 parity=n stop=1
copy con com1
alt+18alt+2ctrl+z

Device starts the requested operation.

When I try to accomplish the same operation from a stand alone debian box or from a debian virtualbox instance of the same windows machine, I had no luck so far.

Here's equivalent linux commands(at least I think so)

stty -F /dev/ttyS0 speed 9600 cs8 -cstopb -parenb
echo '\x12\x02' > /dev/ttyS0

Nothing happens.

Can somebody please direct me to the right direction?

Answer 1

echo '\x12\x02'

will not be interpreted, and will literally write the string \x12\x02 (and append a newline) to the specified serial port. Instead use

echo -n ^R^B

which you can construct on the command line by typing CtrlVCtrlR and CtrlVCtrlB. Or it is easier to use an editor to type into a script file.

The stty command should work, unless another program is interfering. A common culprit is gpsd which looks for GPS devices being plugged in.

Answer 2

If you want to use hex codes, you should add -e option to enable interpretation of backslash escapes by echo (but the result is the same as with echoCtrlRCtrlB). And as wallyk said, you probably want to add -n to prevent the output of a newline:

echo -en '\x12\x02' > /dev/ttyS0

Also make sure that /dev/ttyS0 is the port you want.

Answer 3

SCREEN:

NOTE: screen is actually not able to send hex, as far as I know. To do that, use echo or printf

I was using the suggestions in this post to write to a serial port, then using the info from another post to read from the port, with mixed results. I found that using screen is an "easier" solution, since it opens a terminal session directly with that port. (I put easier in quotes, because screen has a really weird interface, IMO, and takes some further reading to figure it out.)

You can issue this command to open a screen session, then anything you type will be sent to the port, plus the return values will be printed below it:

screen /dev/ttyS0 19200,cs8

(Change the above to fit your needs for speed, parity, stop bits, etc.) I realize screen isn't the "linux command line" as the post specifically asks for, but I think it's in the same spirit. Plus, you don't have to type echo and quotes every time.

ECHO:

Follow praetorian droid's answer. HOWEVER, this didn't work for me until I also used the cat command (cat < /dev/ttyS0) while I was sending the echo command.

PRINTF:

I found that one can also use printf's '%x' command:

c="\x"$(printf '%x' 0x12)
printf $c >> $SERIAL_COMM_PORT

Again, for printf, start cat < /dev/ttyS0 before sending the command.