serial-transport

Serial-Transport

serial-transport is a wrapper around SerialPort that takes the complexity of asynchonous serial communication away, replacing it with a clean and simple promise-based API that understands the request/response nature of serial protocols.

serial-transport lets you define how your packet responses are structured and routes those responses back to the requesting code.

Platform support

https://www.npmjs.com/package/serialport#platform-support

Get started

Setup

npm install serial-transport

Usage

About serial communication

The serial or "comm" port is named as such because the data is in series as opposed to being transmitted in parallel.

However, the serial port only handles the "physical" and "data link" layers of communication. It does not pre-suppose most of the "transport" layer. (Side note: there is no network layer since serial communication is point-to-point and generally does not have to deal with addressing.)

The transport layer is responsible for:

• flow control - tells the transmitting station to "back-off" when no message buffers are available. (which is included in serial communication.)
• message segmentation - re-assembling a message made up of smaller segments.
• message acknowledgement - for relaible end-to-end message delivery.

Limitations of serial port communication

Due to the lack of a standard for message segmentation, serial ports are not able to tell when a message starts or ends. What you get are "data" events that indicate some bytes have been redeived on the port. The data buffer may contain a fragment of a packet, a whole packet, more than one packet, or some combination of the end of a packet, one or more whole packets, and the beginning of another packet.

Packet Handling

serial-transport provides a way to handle the most common "Transport" layer implementations on the serial port.

• Fixed lenth packets
• String-delimted packets

Or you can create your own custom packet strategy.

serial-transport also inludes a packet timeout feature that ensures incomplete packets are processed so that transmission errors don't leave junk data on the receive buffer.

Constructor

openOptions https://node-serialport.github.io/node-serialport/global.html#openOptions