Serial Macro Extensions
Introduction
This plugin provides methods to talk to a device attached to a serial port, directly from the ImageJ Macro language, using the Macro Extension mechanism. You can:
- list the available serial ports
- establish a serial connection
- check if the serial connection is alive
- send commands over the serial connection
- recieve what is available from the serial port
- close the connection
See also
- IJSerial plugin (but requires a separate config file, does not provide persistence to the serial connection)
Authors
Jérôme Mutterer, Tom Mueller, Graeme Awcock, Michael Schmid
Installation (all platforms)
- Requires JSSC library (https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/io.github.java-native/jssc/2.9.4)
- Download serial_ext2.jar to the plugins folder
- Restart ImageJ
Usage
- Make the macro interpreter aware of the new extensions:
run("serial ext2");
- Get a list of available serial ports:
ports = Ext.ports();
- Establish a serial connection to the serial device, using COM8 port and a bitrate of 9600 bps:
Ext.open("COM8",9600,"");
This is enough e.g. for the Arduino, defaults parameters are DATABITS_8,STOPBITS_1,PARITY_NONE
Ext.open("COM1",14400,"DATABITS_8 STOPBITS_2 PARITY_ODD");
An example of advanced serial port configuration
Available options
// DEFAULT: 8 data bits, 1 stop bit, no parity
// Databits: // DATABITS_5 // DATABITS_6 // DATABITS_7 // DATABITS_8
// Stopbits: // STOPBITS_1 // STOPBITS_2 // STOPBITS_1_5
// Parity: // PARITY_NONE // PARITY_EVEN // PARITY_ODD // PARITY_MARK // PARITY_SPACE
- Read what the serial device sends:
data = Ext.readUntil("\n");
- Send a string command to the serial device:
Ext.write("a");
- Close the active serial port:
Ext.close();
- Poll if a serial connection is already there:
active = Ext.alive(); // returns "0" or "1"
- Get help:
print ( Ext.help() );
History
-
2023-06-17 (): Move doc to ImageJ.net wiki; Use JSSC as underlying library
-
2018-10-8 (MIFOBIO2018): a working RXTX version for Windows 64-bit systems was obtained from http://fizzed.com/oss/rxtx-for-java. Copy RXTXcomm.jar to jre/lib/ext/ and rxtxSerial.dll and rxtxParallel.dll to jre/bin
-
0.12 : GA and MS fixed a byte encoding issue.
