Reading from the serial port from C++ or Python on windows

Question

Hi all,

I need to read the serial port from windows, using either Python or C++. What API/Library should I use? Can you direct me to a tutorial? Thanks!

Answer 1

This is classic article about Win32 serial communications: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms810467.aspx

Answer 2

In C++:

1. CreateFile("\\\\.\\COM39", ...)
2. SetCommState
3. SetCommTimeouts
4. ReadFile, WriteFile
5. CloseHandle

There is also a full documentation on communication resources.

Answer 3

In python you've excellent package pyserial that should be cross-platform (I've used only in GNU/Linux environment).

Give it a look, it's very simple to use but very powerful!

Of course examples are provided!

By the way, if it can be useful here you can find a project of mine which use pyserial, as an extended example.

Answer 4

In python it is as simple as importing pyserial and use its open() method (if you are using quite standard system, otherwise you have to adjust a number of parameters to match your environment of course).

EDIT:
As pointed out by Enrico, pyserial is not a default package in many distributions, so you have to install it by your own. I suggest to install and use easy-install, by setuptools to handle your python addons packages.