LINUX SERIAL PORT BINARY DATA INSTALL
LINUX SERIAL PORT BINARY DATA CODE

You can get the pointer filled in by calling sp_get_port_by_name. Since you don’t know the size of it, you can only create a pointer to it. That file defines an sp_port type that is opaque. The library provides a header file, libserialport.h.

LINUX SERIAL PORT BINARY DATA INSTALL

The install goes into /usr/local so I removed the libserialport-dev package just to be sure I didn’t get the wrong one by mistake. Since I use Linux, the build instructions on the page worked fine. A quick Git command, and four lines of build instructions and we were ready to go. I say sort of because the version installed with Ubuntu was old and I needed some features on the newest release, but - as usual - the Internet came to the rescue. Although Sigrok uses it, they maintain it as a separate project and it was just what I needed. I guess the Sigrok developers had the same problem I did and they took the time to write a nice API and port it to major platforms. So while I was talking to an FTDI chip on an FPGA board, you could just as well be talking to an Arduino or a USB voltmeter or anything. While the physical serial port might be on life support, there’s no shortage of equipment that connects via USB that appears to be a serial port.

You might counter that the serial port is old hat, so no one wants to support it with modern systems. You know Sigrok? The logic analyzer software. What I wound up with the serial library from Sigrok. I have my own shim library, but it isn’t well tested and isn’t all that flexible - it does what I need, but I wanted something better.

LINUX SERIAL PORT BINARY DATA CODE

I needed to write some C code that read data from an FPGA’s embedded logic analyzer, and I was annoyed at having to write yet more serial port code. And it is even worse if you want portability. So why is it so annoying to open a simple serial port? It isn’t hard, of course, but on every operating system it seems to be painful - probably in an attempt to be flexible. Every year, though, it seems like things get easier and easier. Depending on how far back you go, programmers had to manage their own fonts, their own allocation space on mass storage, or even their own memory allotments. Modern operating systems insulate us - as programmers, especially - from so much work.

Linux serial port binary data