serialbridge
Bridge between serial ports and TCP sockets on Linux
It is often necessary to bridge a serial port and a TCP socket. Every modern language includes an easy way of opening TCP sockets, while they do not all come with advanced facilities to deal with serial ports. See this blog post for reasons to do so.
Common methods to bridge a serial port and a TCP socket include:
pyserial
: this Python module lets you easily configure and access serial ports;socat
: this program lets you build many kind of briges, including serial port to TCP socket ones.
However, those do not let you configure an arbitrary baud rate that works with every kind of serial port. Configuring an arbitrary baud rate may be needed when dealing with some devices, such as an XBee module, whose clock divisor only allows for speeds such as the non-standard 111,111 bps.
serialbridge
and setspeed
take advantage of ioctl
calls introduced
in 2009 in the Linux kernel named TCGETS2
and TCSETS2
. Those allow
to set a serial port at an arbitrary speed, such as 111,111 bps.
Before the introduction of those new ioctl
calls, it was possible to use
an arbitrary speed by setting the port to 38400 bps and configuring a custom
divisor. However, it does not work on all the devices. In particular, the
ttyACM
driver does not support this way of setting a custom speed and
conveying the information to the device over USB.
Getting serialbridge
You can either download a packaged version, or get the latest development version of serialbridge.Packaged version 0.1
You can download serialbridge 0.1 for Unix, distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).Development version
You can get the current development version of serialbridge using git:git clone https://github.com/samueltardieu/serialbridge.git
This will create a serialbridge
directory in which you will be able to record your own changes.
You can also browse the serialbridge repository on GitHub.
Contributing to serialbridge
Reporting bugs and asking for features
If you find a bug or have an idea for a new feature, you might consider adding a new issue. The more precise you will be in your description, the more useful it will be.Submitting patches
Patches are gladly accepted from their original author. Along with any patches, please state that the patch is your original work and that you license the work to the serialbridge project under a license compatible with the current one (GNU General Public License (GPL)).
To propose a patch, you may fork the serialbridge repository on GitHub, and issue a pull request. You may also send patches and pull requests by email.