C: cross-platform RS-232 serial library? [closed]

27
votes

I am looking for an open source cross-platform library for working with the serial port in C, something along the lines of the awesome PySerial library (unfortunately I have to use C for this application).

I have only found this one: http://www.teuniz.net/RS-232/, and that doesn't seem to have mention OS X compatibility.

6
ccross-platformserial-portinterfacing

6 Answers

40
votes

You would think that a cross-platform C library for serial ports is something that would have existed for 20 years already, but as of 2013 there still wasn't one, so I created libserialport.

It is tested on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux (including Android), BSD and will probably build on other Unix systems also. It supports:

  • Port enumeration (obtaining a list of serial ports on the system)
  • Opening, closing and querying ports
  • Setting port parameters (baud rate, parity, etc.)
  • Port signalling operations (modem control lines, breaks, etc.)
  • Reading, writing, and flushing data
  • Waiting for events
  • Obtaining error information

The initial 0.1.0 release is in active use by the Sigrok project for supporting serial hardware and is packaged in several Linux distributions already. The git version also includes new API calls for getting information about USB serial adapters (VID/PID etc).

8
votes

This is a shameless plug, but I have a MIT licensed library for RS-232 communication which is portable to Windows and Linux and OS X here:

http://wjwwood.io/serial/

7
votes

I realize that you said C and not C++, but perhaps you could use Boost Asio's serial ports and compile that into a library to be linked with your C application. It claims to be POSIX compatible, and OS X is POSIX.

6
votes

I released mine under the MIT license: https://github.com/Marzac/rs232

It is programmed in C and works well for Windows, Mac and Linux.

4
votes

OS X supports the standard POSIX serial API, from <termios.h> and <unistd.h>. Look up the functions tcsetattr(), cfsetspeed() and so on.

3
votes

Get some additional OS X-specific Objective-C code along the lines of AMSerialPort, goSerial, serialconnect, PolKit, ... and implement a conditional compilation of your C source file.

http://osx.hyperjeff.net/Apps/apps?f=serial