Serial

The serial interface will connect to a local serial device.

The serial interface is capable of connection to devices with arbitrary baud-rates (may not be supported on some hardware), flow control, parity, and differing stop bits.

Note

RS-485 support has not been tested yet. Feel free to submit a GitHub issue on your findings.

Simulation

The serial interface supports simulation via the Kevinbot Simulation Framework with a built-in WindowView

Info

Providing a robot class to the interface is required to enable simulation support. This can be None is simulation support is not needed.

The window will contain a separate tab for each "fake" serial device.

Viewing

Data received and sent will be displayed in the main text viewer. UTF-8 control codes (such as LF) will appear yellow. Invalid UTF-8 will appear red.

Note

RX/TX may appear to be swapped. This is because the WindowView is simulating the serial device, rather than the serial interface.

Sending

UTF-8 encoded data can be sent be inputting text into the input line and pressing "Send." Line endings are configurable with the dropdown menu.

To send hex-formatted data, press the "Bin" button to open a hex editor.

The left side will contain the hex input, and the right side will contain the read-only UTF-8 representation. UTF-8 control codes (such as LF) will appear yellow. Invalid UTF-8 will appear red.

Warning

Only input hex values. Do not include invalid hex characters (such as 0x). Spaces are ignored.

Press "Submit" to send the data. The line-ending dropdown is ignored and will not be appended.

Examples

Serial Hardware Query

from pprint import pprint

from kevinbotlib.hardware.interfaces.serial import SerialIdentification

pprint(SerialIdentification.list_device_info())

Serial Raw Ping/Pong

Example

This example requires a serial device responding to pings to be connected.

You can make one using the Ping Pong Test Gadget

The test gadget can be flashed to most PlatformIO compatible devices.

import time

from kevinbotlib.hardware.interfaces.serial import RawSerialInterface

# ! remember to change these settings for your testing environment
gadget = RawSerialInterface(None, "/dev/ttyUSB0", 9600)
# gadget.open() # * not needed if a port is provided above ^

while True:
    gadget.write(b"ping\n")
    print("Sent ping, waiting for pong...")

    while True:
        line = gadget.readline().decode("utf-8").rstrip()
        if line == "pong":
            print("Got pong")
            break

    time.sleep(1)

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1. Arduino Nano image modified from an original image by MakeMagazinDE, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 (link). ↩