The Zana Zen

There is a wide selection of applications that allow bridging the serial port to TCP sockets,
Some of them are not free, and those which are free, do not run on linux.

This drove me to write my own solution to my needs.
As I currently enjoy the simplicity of TCL (Tool Command Language) I wrote the application in pure TCL.
It runs on Windows And Linux without the need to install anything.

The application runs on a computer (Windows / Linux) that is connected to some device via a serial port (RS232)
It will listen on a TCP port of your choice, accepting TCP connections up to the maximum defined by you.
All TCP clients may interact with the serial port at the same time, and all TCP clients recieve all the events
from other TCP clients.
This allows for multiple people to work on the same serial at the same time.
Installation steps :

1. Download the zip file.
   RS232 to TCP
2. Extract it to a folder of your choice.
3. Read the readme.txt file, it is not too long and is very helpful.
4. Edit tcp2com.cfg to suite your needs.
5. Install the standard free distribution of ActiveState TCL.
   From : www.activestate.com
6. Run tcp2com.tcl using TCLSH.

I have adapted the application to suite my needs,
I invite you to do the same

Cheers,
Eitam.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 21st, 2008 at 9:38 pm and is filed under programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.