Bridge serial ports and TCP sockets

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.

License

This software is made available under the GNU General Public License. See the source files and the LICENSE file for more information.

Programs composing this package

serialbridge

serialbridge allows you to build a bridge between a serial port and an incoming TCP socket:

serialbridge [-v] device speed port

For example, the command

% serialbridge /dev/ttyACM0 111111 4161

will open a TCP socket listening on local port 4161 which will be a bridge to /dev/ttyACM0 at a 111,111 bps speed. You can add -v if you want to dump all the information going through the serial port, for debugging or reverse engineering purpose.

serialbridge configures the serial port in raw mode. The bridge is totally transparent.

setspeed

setspeed allows you to configure the speed of a serial port, much like stty allows you to do that, but using the new ioctl calls:

setspeed device speed

For example, the command

% setspeed /dev/ttyACM0 111111

will configure the /dev/ttyACM0 serial port with a 111,111 bps speed. You can then read from and write to this device from the shell or any program.