[R-SIG-Mac] serial port data aquisition via Tcl

[Prof Brian Ripley]

In Tcl/Tk documentation 'Macintosh' does not mean Mac OS X: it 
(usually?) means classic Macintosh.

As for 'up to date': I know people still running Mac OS 8.x.

On Mon, 2 Feb 2009, Atul Sharma wrote:

> The current on-line documentation for Tcl (i.e. the Tcl reference
> manual) still reads "Opening a serial port is not currently
> implemented under Macintosh".  Hence, last week, when I inquired as to
> whether or not it was possible to acquire data from a usb serial
> device from within R, I was pointed to Rpy, which is somewhat indirect
> in that communication is unidirectional from Python to R. While it
> allows R functions to be called from within Python, it is not a very
> familiar environment from an R-user perspective.
>
> As it turns out, the Tcl documentation is not up to date, since the
> open/ puts/ gets/ read commands all allow access to the Macintosh
> serial (USB) port from within the Tcl interpreter. Consequently, it is
> in fact very easy to access the serial port using the tcltk package
> from within R. On the off chance that someone else may need to acquire
> data directly from an external device, I thought I should document how
> this can be done using a few Tcl calls, so that data can be read into
> R in real time, where it can be parsed, processed, and displayed using
> a familiar R environment.
>
>
> require("tcltk")
>
> # Under Unix, hardware ports are mapped to file descriptors. So we
> open the serial port by specifying its file descriptor (typically /dev/
> tty.* or /dev/cu.*. Under Windows, this would be COM1, COM2 etc).
> Here, the resulting channelID (e.g.file10) is assigned to the Tcl
> string 'serial' and the port (file) is opened for read/write access.
> Other options are covered in the Tcl reference manual - see [open].
> .Tcl("set serial [open /dev/cu.usbserial r+]" )
>
> # display the channelID for later references
> .Tcl("puts $serial")
>
> #configure the port setting, here for a non-blocking stream. If
> blocked, make sure the -timeout option is set or it will hang
> .Tcl("fconfigure $serial -mode \"19200,n,8,1\"  -blocking 0")
>
> # read and display individual lines (to the newline character if
> that's how your device is configured)
> .Tcl("puts [gets $serial]")
>
> # or read all the data in the buffer
> .Tcl("puts [read $serial]")
>
> # remember to close the port or you will have to reboot
> .Tcl("close $serial" )
>
> To write to the port, just send "puts $serial <output>" to the Tcl
> interpreter.  In the absence of an R serial library, I think this is
> the simplest approach in that it is platform independent and minimizes
> reliance on external programs other than Tcl, which is supported by R-
> Core.
>
> Atul
>
> -----
> Atul Sharma MD, FRCP(C)
> Department of Pediatrics,
> McGill University
>
>
>
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
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-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595