• From: Freehold, NJ
  • Registered: 2010-11-28
  • Posts: 21

Topic: USB to Serial Port

I'm at a complete loss as to how to approach writing the code to connect to a serial port. I have a breakout board for an FTDI chip to allow connecton to a serial port through one of the USB connectors on a Forecast 8". I can find lots of examples for AVR microprocessors, but not much about ARM microprocessors.

Perhaps this is obvious, but I haven't found anything that would point me toward a solution.

  • Madox
  • Busy Chum
  • Offline
  • From: Sydney
  • Registered: 2008-04-12
  • Posts: 121

Re: USB to Serial Port

You're be going through Linux rather than ARM specifically.

A FTDI board/chip usually enumerates out to ttyUSBx which you can configure using stty and then just read/write to it.

If you're using Python or similar, I have code that uses pySerial to communicate with serial ports for purposes of servo control (Refer http://code.google.com/p/madox/ then MRover).  That code assumes /dev/ttyACM0 though which you have to change for the FTDI device.

Madox's Website

3 Reply by stonechild (edited by stonechild 2011-01-31 13:54:48)

  • From: Freehold, NJ
  • Registered: 2010-11-28
  • Posts: 21

Re: USB to Serial Port

Thanks Madox,

I was actually looking at different explanations of how to use stty, but not comprehending them. As far as an embedded processor goes, I'm used to the Arduino with the Serial object or the registers.

Thanks for mentioning your code which I've downloaded.  I had come across references to pySerial which I'll now look at.

Now that I have an idea  what to  look for, I've come across http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Serial-HOWTO.html which is pretty comprehensive.