This is a port program with erlang driver for serial communication, originally written by Johan Bevemyr in 1996 and sporadically maintained by Tony Garnock-Jones from 2007 onwards.

This library is designed to run as an Erlang library, not an application dependency. To install this library, clone the library to a location of your choice and run the following from the command line:

make
DESTDIR=/usr/lib make install

Adjust the DESTDIR path accordingly if Erlang is not installed at /usr/lib/erlang. The serial module should now be accessible in Erlang, which can be verified by running erl. serial:start() should return a PID.

Erlang/OTP 17 [erts-6.4.1] [source] [64-bit] [smp:4:4] [async-threads:10] [kernel-poll:false]

Eshell V6.4.1  (abort with ^G)
1> serial:start().
<0.35.0>

The following examples are excerpts from examples/basic_example.erl.

Opening a connection to a USB serial adapter at 9600 baud:

SerialPort = serial:start([{open, "/dev/ttyUSB0"}, {speed, 9600}])

Sending a message out the serial port:

SerialPort ! {send, "Hello World\r\n"}

Data is received as a message to the process that called serial:start(). That process can handle the data by implementing a function like the following:

listen() ->
  receive
    % Receive data from the serial port on the caller's PID.
    {data, Bytes} ->
      io:format("~s", [Bytes]),
      listen()
  after
    % Stop listening after 5 seconds of inactivity.
    5000 ->
      io:format("~n"),
      ok
  end.

See examples/terminal.erl for more example code (using the now-obsolete gs module).

Copyright (c) 1996, 1999 Johan Bevemyr
Copyright (c) 2007, 2009 Tony Garnock-Jones

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.