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Serial Port I/O RS232
I was developing an application in which I needed to communicate to a device via a serial port on a PC. The OS that I had was Windows XP.
Tthe latest version of the Java Communications API is 3.0. The only problem is that if you want to deploy to a windows platform then you will be unable to use it.
Quoting Sun's Java Communications 3.0 API :
"Implementations of the API are currently available for Solaris SPARC, Solaris x86, and Linux x86."
No mention of Windows. I was unable to find an older version of the API which did work on windows so I had to look elsewhere.
The solution came from Trent Jarvi's RXTX package. Go to the downloads section to get the files relevant to your platform.
To install on windows:
- unzip rxtx-2.1-7bins-r2-winxp.zip,
- copy rxtxSerial.dll to %JAVA_HOME%\bin,
(%JAVA_HOME% is the folder where JRE is installed on your system; e.g. C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.5.0_06)
- copy RXTXcomm.jar to %JAVA_HOME%\lib\ext
For other packages check out the INSTALL file in the zip archive.
To use it in your Java source, place "import gnu.io.*;" in your source file. You can use Sun's API to figure out what to do with it.
There is a good demo called SerialDemo which demonstrates how to use serial I/O. Just change the import statement. Do not forget to include the JAR file into your library path in your IDE.
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