Serialport

A cross-platform serial port communication library for OCaml that supports both POSIX and Windows systems and any concurrent I/O runtime.

Comparison with OSerial library

The oldest OCaml library for working with serial ports is the OSerial library. It is a simple and hardcoded library for POSIX serial port manipulation that only works with Lwt. It does not support all the necessary features and does not look like a real library, so you probably wouldn't want to use it.

In comparison, Serialport offers more rich features and a cross-platform implementation (supports Linux, macOS and Windows), an agnostic I/O runtime interface, and lightweight abstractions with detailed documentation.

Quick start

You can install the serialport library using the OPAM package manager or any other method you prefer.

$ opam install serialport

If you want to use the Lwt runtime or other concurrent I/O runtimes (that are supported by Serialport), they should already be installed on your system.

You can also get the latest version of the upstream (developer) branch.

$ opam pin serialport.dev https://github.com/dx3mod/serialport.git

If you are using Dune, please add the serialport library to your dependencies.

In use

A simple example of using a serial port to send the message "Hello World!" using channels.

let () = 
  Serialport.with_open_communication "/dev/tty.uart-device" @@ fun pd ->
  Serialport.Descriptor.configure' pd ~baud_rate:9600 "8N1";

  let (_, oc) = Serialport.Descriptor.to_channels pd in 
  Out_channel.output_string oc "Hello World!\n"

In more realistic scenarios, you would need to use a specific I/O library for your application's runtime, such as serialport.unix for synchronous Unix code or serialport.lwt for Lwt programming.

Serialport_unix.Descriptor.write_string pd "Hello World!\n"

You need to keep in mind that you are interacting with a physical device outside of the operating system, which is why there may be delays and other issues!

For more details, see API references and examples/ directory.

References

For research this topic you should read Serial Programming Guide for POSIX Operating Systems for Unix systems and Windows Serial Port Programming for Windows platform.

Other implementations

• outdated OCaml Serial Module m-laniakea/oserial,
• Rust serialport,
• Golang bugst/go-serial.

Credits

I would like to express my deep gratitude to the author of the Simple UART library, from which platform-dependent code was borrowed.

Showcases

Look at projects that use the Serial port library. They are good examples of how to do things.

• Burav is a utility for burning firmware onto AVR MCUs. Uses Serialport to communicate with bootloaders and programmer devices.

License

The project is licensed under the MIT License, which allows for all permissions. Just use it and enjoy yourself without fear. We are always open to pull requests!