Hi Frabs,
What does "slinky" mean? I looked is up and found out it was a spring toy, but I do not really understand what you wanted to say...

Anyway, regarding the reading of bytes from the serial port: I didn't really detail this, because there are literally loads of freely available applications out there which perform the function of serial port sniffing and displaying, in any format you would need.

However, in case someone does want to do this in C#, the serialport class available, which is used in the above example provides several methods. To read bytes, you could use any of the following:

serialPort1.Read(byte_buffer,0,10); //this will read 10 bytes from the serial port and insert them starting with index 0 in a byte array called "byte_buffer", which has to be declared above


received_byte=serialPort1.Readbyte(); //this will read one byte from the serial port, and store it in a variable called received_byte


received_char=serialPort1.Readchar(); //same as above but reads a char


serialPort1.Readline(); //reads characters from the input buffer until the NewLine character is encountered; returns a string

Please pay attention though that the usage of all these functions is somewhat...tricky. In case you call any of these functions and no byte is available in the input buffer of the serial port, your application will appear to hang, and it will do so until either you kill it or the number of expected bytes (or at least one byte, depending on which of the above you use) is finally transmitted by the peripheral connected to the serial port of the PC.

There are ways of making the application work somewhat like in an "interrupt" manner, using the C# concept of "events" which trigger a function when bytes are available in the input buffer of the serial port, but although I am familiar enough to use them, I lack the theoretical notions of C# required to thoroughly explain these.

Regarding your thoughts of giving C# a try... I congratulate you! As you may have noticed, I am no C# expert myself, but for the hardware engineer who sometimes wants to format some text/binary files, to extract some data, to make a simple GUI...or to write some bytes to the serial port, it is a great tool. And this sharpdevelop compiler (not only free, but also open source, which is great!) only asks you to install a small amount on your PC (not hundreds of megabytes, like other IDEs)

Regards,
Cristian

Then you taught me another way to access the serial port, thank you :)

Regards,
Emrah

Enslaving machines to free the mankind...

Hi Cristian,

I am using Visual studio 8, i want to read the data from the serial port, i am actually interfacing pc and microcontroller.the data from the controller is commin to the serial port, from that i need to read and display it on the front end, the GUI is ready but data is to be read. does anyone knw as to how to do this? pls help

Hi Stupido,
Can you give me some example of such devices? What you say is really news to me, although I realize that one of the previous posters in this thread might be experiencing the same.
If you told me what device this is, I might be looking if we have it here and I would investigate what does not work.

Regards,
Cristian

Hi guys,

I try to access my serial port device remotely, pls help.

Ronald

Hi vigz,
To answer short: yes, it is possible. I am a little confuzed though, on your approach. Do you want to use the USB port or thephysical serial port of the PC? If you want to use the serial port, you can surely use the C# example in the article. If you want to use the USB port, you can also use thei c# example, provided that you use a USB-to-serial port converter that comes with Vicrtual Com Port (VCP) drivers. FTDI makes a few of these ICs and they work pretty neat from C#.

Regards,
Cristian

Hi man,
If you follow exactly the steps described in the article, you might want to replace the

//write data to serial port
serialPort1.Write("ABC");

instruction with:

//write data to serial port
serialPort1.Write("ATD 00000");

I believe this should do it. Of course, you can also use your approach, but the easiness of the AT commands resides exactly in giving the user the possibility to use ASCII strings, so you would do it more complicated than necessary.

Good luck,
Cristian

Hi Cristian,

At first i wrote the code for USB-to-RS232 converter cable, like you said the above code work perfectly but now i connect the plain USB cable to the PC and it is not working.

Thanks,

Ruth