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Sample C Code for Serial Communication Port: Configuring Baud Rate, Parity, and Stop Bits



I am a little bit confused about reading and writing to a serial port. I have a USB device in Linux that uses the FTDI USB serial device converter driver. When I plug it in, it creates: /dev/ttyUSB1.


This demo program opens and initializes a serial terminal at 115200 baud for non-canonical mode that is as portable as possible.The program transmits a hardcoded text string to the other terminal, and delays while the output is performed.The program then enters an infinite loop to receive and display data from the serial terminal.By default the received data is displayed as hexadecimal byte values.




sample c code for serial communication port



Unluckily, using serial ports in Linux is not the easiest thing in the world. When dealing with the termios.h header, there are many finicky settings buried within multiple bytes worth of bitfields. This page is an attempt to help explain these settings and show you how to configure a serial port in Linux correctly.


To write to a serial port, you write to the file. To read from a serial port, you read from the file. Of course, this allows you to send/receive data, but how do you set the serial port parameters such as baud rate, parity, e.t.c? This is set by a special tty configuration struct.


At this point we could technically read and write to the serial port, but it will likely not work, because the default configuration settings are not designed for serial port use. So now we will set the configuration correctly.


We need access to the termios struct in order to configure the serial port. We will create a new termios struct, and then write the existing configuration of the serial port to it using tcgetattr(), before modifying the parameters as needed and saving the settings with tcsetattr().


UNIX systems provide two basic modes of input, canonical and non-canonical mode. In canonical mode, input is processed when a new line character is received. The receiving application receives that data line-by-line. This is usually undesirable when dealing with a serial port, and so we normally want to disable canonical mode.


The c_oflag member of the termios struct contains low-level settings for output processing. When configuring a serial port, we want to disable any special handling of output chars/bytes, so do the following:


Both OXTABS and ONOEOT are not defined in Linux. Linux however does have the XTABS field which seems to be related. When compiling for Linux, I just exclude these two fields and the serial port still works fine.


Rather than use bit fields as with all the other settings, the serial port baud rate is set by calling the functions cfsetispeed() and cfsetospeed(), passing in a pointer to your tty struct and a enum:


You can use FIONREAD along with ioctl() to see if there are any bytes available in the OS input (receive) buffer for the serial port1. This can be useful in a polling-style method in where the application regularly checks for bytes before trying to read them.


Sometimes we require to communicate with an external device like a printer, microcontroller board or any serial device using the serial port of a windows machine. There is a lot of serial application available like Hercules, HyperTerminal, Docklight, ..etc.


We can use any one of them for serial communication but sometimes we require to create our own custom serial application for communication. In windows, it is easy to create the custom serial application using the win32 API.


In this blog post, we will learn serial port programming using the Win32 API. In Windows, serial port programming is very easy, MSDN provide all the required win32 API information which require for the serial port programming.


In windows, the serial device will display in com port section of device manager with name as COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4.. etc. Generally, COM1 and COM2 refer to the hardware serial ports present in the PC and another com port number is export when any serial device or USB to serial device attached to PC. It also possible that com id could be virtual ( for example static virtual com port).


In the below console application, I am using the win32 API to open the com port and sending the data to the open COM port. See the below video where I have downloaded the Arduino code in the Arduino board and communicating with this board using the console application.


This sample app enumerates all serial devices connected to the device and displays the list in the ListBox ConnectDevices. The following code connects and configure the selected device ID and creates a SerialDevice object.


Reading input from serial port is done by Listen() invoked right after initialization of the serial port. We do this in the sample code by creating an async read task using the DataReader object that waits on the InputStream of the SerialDevice object.


The following code example demonstrates the use of the SerialPort class to allow two users to chat from two separate computers connected by a null modem cable. In this example, the users are prompted for the port settings and a username before chatting. Both computers must be executing the program to achieve full functionality of this example.


Use this class to control a serial port file resource. This class provides synchronous and event-driven I/O, access to pin and break states, and access to serial driver properties. Additionally, the functionality of this class can be wrapped in an internal Stream object, accessible through the BaseStream property, and passed to classes that wrap or use streams.


The SerialPort class supports the following encodings: ASCIIEncoding, UTF8Encoding, UnicodeEncoding, UTF32Encoding, and any encoding defined in mscorlib.dll where the code page is less than 50000 or the code page is 54936. You can use alternate encodings, but you must use the ReadByte or Write method and perform the encoding yourself.


The example source code demonstrates how to set up serial communication between Pixhawk and an offboard computer via USB or a telemetry radio, how to put the vehicle in offboard mode, and how to send and receive MAVLink messages over the interface.


When properly configured, UART can work with many different types of serial protocols that involve transmitting and receiving serial data. In serial communication, data is transferred bit by bit using a single line or wire. In two-way communication, we use two wires for successful serial data transfer. Depending on the application and system requirements, serial communications needs less circuitry and wires, which reduces the cost of implementation.


By definition, UART is a hardware communication protocol that uses asynchronous serial communication with configurable speed. Asynchronous means there is no clock signal to synchronize the output bits from the transmitting device going to the receiving end.


For UART and most serial communications, the baud rate needs to be set the same on both the transmitting and receiving device. The baud rate is the rate at which information is transferred to a communication channel. In the serial port context, the set baud rate will serve as the maximum number of bits per second to be transferred.


Third: The entire packet is sent serially starting from start bit to stop bit from the transmitting UART to the receiving UART. The receiving UART samples the data line at the preconfigured baud rate.


The sample MCUs provide a full-duplex UART port, which is fully compatible with PC standard UARTs. The UART port provides a simplified UART interface to other peripherals or hosts, supporting full-duplex, DMA, and asynchronous transfer of serial data. The UART port includes support for five to eight data bits, and none, even, or odd parity. A frame is terminated by one and a half or two stop bits.


Familiarity with the UART communication protocol is advantageous when developing robust, quality-driven products. Knowing how to send data using only two wires, as well as how to transport a whole pack of data or a payload, will help ensure that data is transferred and received without error. Since UART is the most commonly used hardware communication protocol, this knowledge can enable design flexibility in future designs.


Embedded electronics is all about interlinking circuits (processors or other integrated circuits) to create a symbiotic system. In order for those individual circuits to swap their information, they must share a common communication protocol. Hundreds of communication protocols have been defined to achieve this data exchange, and, in general, each can be separated into one of two categories: parallel or serial.


Parallel communication certainly has its benefits. It's fast, straightforward, and relatively easy to implement. But it requires many more input/output (I/O) lines. If you've ever had to move a project from a basic Arduino Uno to a Mega, you know that the I/O lines on a microprocessor can be precious and few. So, we often opt for serial communication, sacrificing potential speed for pin real estate.


The baud rate specifies how fast data is sent over a serial line. It's usually expressed in units of bits-per-second (bps). If you invert the baud rate, you can find out just how long it takes to transmit a single bit. This value determines how long the transmitter holds a serial line high/low or at what period the receiving device samples its line.


A serial interface where both devices may send and receive data is either full-duplex or half-duplex. Full-duplex means both devices can send and receive simultaneously. Half-duplex communication means serial devices must take turns sending and receiving.


Some serial busses might get away with just a single connection between a sending and receiving device. For example, our Serial Enabled LCDs are all ears and don't really have any data to relay back to the controlling device. This is what's known as simplex serial communication. All you need is a single wire from the master device's TX to the listener's RX line. 2ff7e9595c


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