composer require blamebutton/php-serial
PHP Serial was written at a time where I did not know any other language than PHP and I started to get seriously bored with its abilities.
I somehow got hold of a « Citizen C2202-PD » point-of-sale display, and I wanted to play around with it. I also managed to get the documentation of it, and created a convenience class to access the serial port though the Linux file.
Afterwards, I posted it to PHP Classes, and this probably is what brought it any visibility.
<?php
include 'SerialConnection.php';
// Let's start the class
$serial = new datagutten\phpSerial\SerialConnection();
// First we must specify the device. This works on both linux and windows (if
// your linux serial device is /dev/ttyS0 for COM1, etc)
$serial->setDevice("COM1");
// We can change the baud rate, parity, length, stop bits, flow control
$serial->setBaudRate(2400);
$serial->setParity("none");
$serial->setCharacterLength(8);
$serial->setStopBits(1);
$serial->setFlowControl("none");
// Then we need to open it
$serial->open();
// To write into
$serial->send("Hello, World!");
Interestingly enough, this piece of code that is widely untested has created a lot if interest ever since it was created, and especially nowadays with everybody toying around with Arduinos and Raspberry Pis. I receive about 1 email every month asking for help with the code or sending patches/suggestions.
I think that it is time for me to remove the dust off this project and to give it a full visibility on modern tools, aka GitHub.
There is lots of bugs. I know there is. I just don't know which are they.
- Linux: the initially supported platform, the one I used. Probably the less buggy one.
- MacOS: although I never tried it on MacOS, it is similar to Linux and some patches were submitted to me, so I guess it is OK
- Windows: it seems to be working for some people, not working for some others. Theoretically there should be a way to get it done.
I have a few concerns regarding the behaviour of this code.
- Inter-platform consistency. I seriously doubt that all operations go the same way across all platforms.
- Read operations. Reading was never needed in my project, so all the tests I did on that matter were theoretic. I was also quite naive, so the API is probably not optimal. What we need is to re-think reading from scratch.
- Configuration done by calling functions. This is so Java. It would be much better to be able to pass a configuration array once and for all. Furthermore, I suspect that the order of call matters, which is bad.
- Auto-closing the device. There is an auto-close function that is registered at PHP shutdown. This sounds quite ridiculous, something has to be done about that.
- Use exceptions. Currently there is an heavy use of the errors system to report errors (2007 baby), but this is seriously lame. They have to be replaced by actual exceptions.
I have about 0 time to code or test this project. However, there is clearly a need for it.
As in all open-source projects, I need people to fit this to their needs and to contribute back their code.
What is needed, IMHO:
- Address the concerns listed above, and find new ones.
- Create a reproducible test environment for each OS, and prove that each feature works (basically, unit-testing).
- Report of use cases, bugs, missing features, etc.
If you feel like doing any of those, do not hesitate to create an issue or a pull-request, I'll gladly consider consider it :)
PHP Serial Copyright (C) 2007-2014 PHP Serial's contributors (see CONTRIBUTORS file)
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA.