Looking for a way forward with Microcontrollers/Microprocessors

[donotdespisethesnake]

Andreasf: I've not used a real com port in well over 6 years, I use FTDI mainly these days. I tried the FTDI DLL method in Delphi but I feel I'm going about parsing the input in a wrong way. I will look into C#, I used it at college, but they only had us doing simple stuff like adding numbers on screen.

I moved from Delphi to C#, and although there is a bit of a learning curver, C# is a lot like a better Delphi. I am sure part of the reason for that is that Anders Hejlsberg was chief architect of Delphi who went on to be lead architect of C#. The Visual Studio Express editions are nice to use and free, there is now a free Visual Studio edition as well.

Certainly for building a basic GUI and talking to serial ports it is fairly easy.

[pmurray4]

Is there a cross platform way to easily communicate between a computer and a MCU with java or qt? Since com port is dicey across platforms is there a way of direct USB per chance?

[nctnico]

I'm using wxCtb for dealing with serial ports on Linux and Windows (http://wxcode.sourceforge.net/showcomp.php?name=wxCtb). It is supposed to be a WxWidgets 'component' but that just ends with the naming convention. It can be used completely standalone without any of the WxWidgets includes.

[zapta]

I used pyserial on Mac OSX but without GUI.

[enz]

Qt comes with QSerialPort. I used it on Windows and Linux and it worked out of the box with both OS.

[donotdespisethesnake]

I haven't done much Java, but I have used JSSC which worked quite well https://github.com/scream3r/java-simple-serial-connector.

As for a direct USB interface, it's a great idea but I don't think any OS supports that directly. The idea of USB is that it is device oriented, i.e. mouse, keyboard, modem, disk etc. Having a plain old IO port to make it easy for developers seemed to escape the USB designers. The closest thing to a raw pipe is CDC serial, which is a subset of the whole comms device class, designed to include modems, fax machines etc, which were assumed to be the only things that would require COM port type functions.

If anyone has tried it, can libusb be used to create a cross platform "direct" comms? Or at least a uniform device interface.

[zapta]

I haven't done much Java, but I have used JSSC which worked quite well https://github.com/scream3r/java-simple-serial-connector.

It looks very good. Thanks. Always struggled with Java when it came to serial ports.