Skip to content
Prev 36481 / 63421 Next

Serial connections?

On Apr 20, 2010, at 10:33 AM, Blair Christian wrote:

            
Yes (I have Arduinos reporting measurements from all sensors in the house to R on my iMac which produces plots that are synchronized with my webserver). In principle you can simply use /dev/tty.usb... and read from it. In most cases the default setting is already fine (9600,n,8,1 on Mac) or you can use tools the set it up in advance (setserial on Linux etc.) so you don't have to worry about setting up the serial from R.

Depending on your OS you may be able to read from the serial device directly with a regular file connection or you can use a pipe connection to a tool which pipes out from the tty to stdout (written for a Mac but may work on other unices):

https://svn.rforge.net/C/trunk/tools/ttys.c

and then use something like

f=pipe("ttys /dev/tty.usbserial-X1234")

A rather handy option -d prepends current time to each line so you can track output over time. I have some more tools for this (even allowing you to share form Arduino output with several computers or even send remote commands to your Arduino including encryption etc ...).

Cheers,
Simon

PS: From experience I can say that Arduinos are highly addictive so beware ;).