THIS IS ONLY THE FORK!

it is adding blocking read functionality. I added a config hash to the c'tor so that you can control VMIN & VTIME termio settings for the device. VMIN was fixed to 0 before resulting in effectively always returning immediatly from the read call and you could not just block wait for input. But polling is bad. The other thing i did was to add a getter for the file descriptor. This makes it possible to use the serial device in a select call. You can also use select to avoid polling but much more it is useful to use it to let the OS block wait on multiple IO sources simultaneously.

It made the changes in a way which will not break existing code. Old code just does what it did before.

To block reading add vmin: Serial.new(path, nil, nil, vmin: 1). This will block until at least one character was read.

To wait for multiple input sources use select:

sp = Serial.new(path) # combine some sources in1, in2, and the serial port result = IO.select([in1, in2, IO.new(sp.fd)])

The IO#select call returns and array of arrays with file descriptors ready for reading (it's more complex, see IO#select manual)

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rubyserial

RubySerial is a simple Ruby gem for reading from and writing to serial ports.

Unlike other Ruby serial port implementations, it supports all of the most popular Ruby implementations (MRI, JRuby, & Rubinius) on the most popular operating systems (OSX, Linux, & Windows). And it does not require any native compilation thanks to using RubyFFI https://github.com/ffi/ffi.

The interface to RubySerial should be (mostly) compatible with other Ruby serialport gems, so you should be able to drop in the new gem, change the require and use it as a replacement. If not, please let us know so we can address any issues.

Installation

$ gem install rubyserial

Usage

require 'rubyserial'
serialport = Serial.new '/dev/ttyACM0', 57600

Methods

write(data : String) -> Int

Returns the number of bytes written. Emits a RubySerial::Exception on error.

read(length : Int) -> String

Returns a string up to length long. It is not guaranteed to return the entire length specified, and will return an empty string if no data is available. Emits a RubySerial::Exception on error.

getbyte -> Fixnum or nil

Returns an 8 bit byte or nil if no data is available. Emits a RubySerial::Exception on error.

RubySerial::Exception

A wrapper exception type, that returns the underlying system error code.

License

Apache 2.0. See LICENSE for more details.