RB232

A simple serial port library for Ruby.

Licensed under the MIT license (See COPYING file for details)

Author: James Smith (james@floppy.org.uk / www.floppy.org.uk)

Homepage: github.com/Floppy/rb232

Documentation: docs.github.com/Floppy/rb232

ABOUT

This library is a simple serial port library for Ruby.

You may ask, why not just use ruby-serialport? Mainly because the GPL license it is under is too restrictive for my purposes. This code is under the MIT license, so you can do anything you like with it.

INSTALLATION

1) Enable gems from gemcutter, if you haven’t already done so:

> sudo gem install gemcutter
> sudo gem tumble

2) Install gem

> sudo gem install rb232

STATUS

Currently you can read from a serial port, but not write back. The code is only tested on Linux and Snow Leopard - other unixes may work, but Windows is right

out for now. Watch this space for further developments!

USAGE

The following code will read a 10-character string from the specified port, using the default port settings (9600/8/n/1/no flow control)

@port = RB232::Port.new('/dev/ttyUSB0')
message = @port.read_string(10)

You can provide alternative settings when you create a new port:

RB232::Port.new('/dev/ttyS0', :baud_rate => 19200, 
                              :data_bits => 7, 
                              :parity => true, 
                              :stop_bits => 2,
                              :hardware_flow_control => true)

Note that OSX doesn’t currently have hardware flow control support.

See github.com/Floppy/rb232/tree/master/spec/port_spec.rb or RB232::Port documentation for more details.

If you are using a simple text protocol over RS232, you can use the RB232::TextProtocol class to help you out. It automatically monitors the port and splits messages up by detecting separator characters. See github.com/Floppy/rb232/tree/master/examples/listen.rb for an example of how to use this class.