दूरसंवाद / DURSAMVAD — RS232 communication program
दूरसंवाद / DURSAMVAD — RS232 communication program
The name is derived from two Hindi words: दूर (dūr) meaning far or distant (pronounce with long u so that it rhymes with poor) and संवाद (samvād), meaning discussion (the first a should be pronounced as u in gun, the second a should be pronounced long as in grass). The transliteration in the Velthuis system or ITRANS would be dUrasaMvAda.
The program serves as a simple testing tool for RS232 communication. It can display not only the received bytes but can also show the status of the modem lines as well as monitor communication of two devices. It is possible to use USB to RS232 adapters.
The program was written and tested on Linux and may hopefully work on other Unix systems. It will not work on other operating systems.
The program requires perl-Tk and Device::SerialPort. Both modules can be installed from CPAN. As the first option you should use the packages included in your Linux distribution, try CPAN only if the packages are not available. Specifically, perl-Tk on CPAN often requires newer perl than that distributed with server-type Linux distros as RHEL or CentOS. Perl-Tk from CPAN may not work properly in these distros while the rpm module, that can be installed and/or updated by yum, works fine.
Specifically, in RHEL, CentOS, Fedora, you have to run
yum install perl-Tk yum install perl-Device-SerialPort |
In Debian, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, you have to run
apt-get install perl-tk apt-get install libdevice-serialport-perl |
Some measurement devices still communicate using the RS232 interface. A few years ago RS232 port appeared on all computers. Recently USB ports are preferred.
Measurement devices do not always contain communication software. It is useful to have possibility to test communication manually using a terminal program. Programs as minicom and picocom are helpful but do not display the modem lines. Program cutecom does not allow to use USB (at least the version distributed with Linux installed on my computer). I wrote this simple program in order to solve these difficulties and in addition to learn how to develop a terminal with GUI.
The program offers two modes:
You can view the screenshots.
The program can be used, modified and redistributed under the GNU General Public License version 2 or newer.
Download: dursamvad-1.0.tar.gz (28 KiB)
I am forced to sponsor musicians and other copyright organisations by my programming work because I store my software, input data as well as the results of calculation on CD and DVD media.