Serial Tutorial

With the MINA 2.0 you are able to connect to serial port like you use to connect to a TCP/IP port with MINA.

Getting MINA 2.0

For now MINA 2.0 final isn't released, but you you can download the latest built version (2.0.0-M4). 

If you prefer to build the code from the trunk, and need assistance to do so, please consult the Developer Guide.

Prerequisite

Useful Information Before accessing serial port from a Java program you need a native library (.DLL or .so depending of your OS). MINA use the one from RXTX.org : ftp://ftp.qbang.org/pub/rxtx/rxtx-2.1-7-bins-r2.zipjust put the good .dll or .so in the jre/lib/i386/ path of your JDK/JRE or use the -Djava.library.path= argument for specify where you placed the native libraries

Connecting to a serial port

Serial communication for MINA provide only an IoConnector, due to the point-to-point nature of the communication media.

At this point you are supposed to have already read the MINA tutorial.

Now for connecting to a serial port you need a SerialConnector :

// create your connector
IoConnector connector = new SerialConnector()
connector.setHandler( ... here your buisness logic IoHandler ... );

Nothing very different of a SocketConnector.

Let's create an address for connecting to our serial port.

SerialAddress portAddress=new SerialAddress( "/dev/ttyS0", 38400, 8, StopBits.BITS_1, Parity.NONE, FlowControl.NONE );

The first parameter is your port identifier. For Windows computer, the serial ports are called "COM1", "COM2", etc... For Linux and some other Unix : "/dev/ttyS0", "/dev/ttyS1", "/dev/ttyUSB0".

The remaining parameters are depending of the device you are driving and the supposed communications characteristics.

• the baud rate
• the data bits
• the parity
• the flow control mecanism

Once it's done, connect the connector to the address :

ConnectFuture future = connector.connect( portAddress );
future.await();
IoSession sessin = future.getSession();

And voila ! Everything else is as usual, you can plug your filters and codecs.
for learn more about RS232 : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS232