PHP Serial was written at a time where I did not know any other language than PHP and I started to get seriously bored with its abilities.

I somehow got hold of a « Citizen C2202-PD » point-of-sale display, and I wanted to play around with it. I also managed to get the documentation of it, and created a convenience class to access the serial port though the Linux file.

Afterwards, I posted it to PHP Classes, and this probably is what brought it any visibility.

<?php
include 'PhpSerial.php';

// Let's start the class
$serial = new PhpSerial;

// First we must specify the device. This works on both linux and windows (if
// your linux serial device is /dev/ttyS0 for COM1, etc)
$serial->deviceSet("COM1");

// We can change the baud rate, parity, length, stop bits, flow control
$serial->confBaudRate(2400);
$serial->confParity("none");
$serial->confCharacterLength(8);
$serial->confStopBits(1);
$serial->confFlowControl("none");

// Then we need to open it
$serial->deviceOpen();

// To write into
$serial->sendMessage("Hello !");

Interestingly enough, this piece of code that is widely untested has created a lot if interest ever since it was created, and especially nowadays with everybody toying around with Arduinos and Raspberry Pis. I receive about 1 email every month asking for help with the code or sending patches/suggestions.

I think that it is time for me to remove the dust off this project and to give it a full visibility on modern tools, aka GitHub.

There is lots of bugs. I know there is. I just don't know which are they.

• Linux: the initially supported platform, the one I used. Probably the less buggy one.
• MacOS: although I never tried it on MacOS, it is similar to Linux and some patches were submitted to me, so I guess it is OK
• Windows: it seems to be working for some people, not working for some others. Theoretically there should be a way to get it done.

I have a few concerns regarding the behaviour of this code.

• Inter-platform consistency. I seriously doubt that all operations go the same way across all platforms.
• Read operations. Reading was never needed in my project, so all the tests I did on that matter were theoretic. I was also quite naive, so the API is probably not optimal. What we need is to re-think reading from scratch.
• Configuration done by calling functions. This is so Java. It would be much better to be able to pass a configuration array once and for all. Furthermore, I suspect that the order of call matters, which is bad.
• Auto-closing the device. There is an auto-close function that is registered at PHP shutdown. This sounds quite ridiculous, something has to be done about that.
• Use exceptions. Currently there is an heavy use of the errors system to report errors (2007 baby), but this is seriously lame. They have to be replaced by actual exceptions.

I have about 0 time to code or test this project. However, there is clearly a need for it.

As in all open-source projects, I need people to fit this to their needs and to contribute back their code.

What is needed, IMHO:

• Address the concerns listed above, and find new ones.
• Create a reproducible test environment for each OS, and prove that each feature works (basically, unit-testing).
• Report of use cases, bugs, missing features, etc.

If you feel like doing any of those, do not hesitate to create an issue or a pull-request, I'll gladly consider consider it :)

PHP Serial Copyright (C) 2007-2014 PHP Serial's contributors (see CONTRIBUTORS file)

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA.