Serial Port Code Library

Need to interact with some hardware via serial port? I’m having to do some serial port communications in a project at work, and it is officially Not Fun. There was some original code that was doing only reads from the port, and I needed to some significant functionality that would not be possible with the existing code. So rather than writing a ton of code from scratch (well, other than what I will have to do anyway), I tried to find some open-source, commercial-friendly serial port libraries on the Internet.

The only one I could find that seemed to be perfectly suited to the task at hand was Serial Library for C++ by Ramon de Klein. It has a number of classes for various ways of accessing the serial port and handling events, interacting with Windows. It also supports MFC.

The license is LGPL, which makes it’s ok for me to use in the project. As Ramon’s article notes, doing serial port communications from scratch is hard. So reuse what is out there.

If you’re in .Net, you already have some nice classes in the form of System.IO.Ports.SerialPort, which was added in 2.0.

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