node-red-nodes/io/serialport/README.md

node-red-node-serialport
========================

<a href="http://nodered.org" target="_new">Node-RED</a> nodes to talk to an hardware Serial port.

**Note** : This is the same node as was in the core of Node-RED.
As of v0.10.8 it will be installed from here instead.

Install
-------

Run the following command in the root directory of your Node-RED install, usually
this is ~/.node-red .

        sudo npm install -g --unsafe-perm node-red-node-serialport

During install there may be multiple messages about optional compilation.
These may look like failures... as they report as failure to compile errors -
but often are warnings and the node will continue to install and, assuming nothing else
failed, you should be able to use it. Occasionally some platforms *will* require
you to install the full set of tools in order to compile the underlying package.


Usage
-----

Provides two nodes - one to receive messages, and one to send.

###Input

Reads data from a local serial port.

Clicking on the search icon will attempt to autodetect serial ports attached to
the device, however you many need to manually specify it. COM1, /dev/ttyUSB0, etc

It can either

 - wait for a "split" character (default \n). Also accepts hex notation (0x0a).
 - wait for a timeout in milliseconds for the first character received
 - wait to fill a fixed sized buffer

It then outputs **msg.payload** as either a UTF8 ascii string or a binary Buffer object.

If no split character is specified, or a timeout or buffer size of 0, then a stream
of single characters is sent - again either as ascii chars or size 1 binary buffers.

###Output

Provides a connection to an outbound serial port.

Only the **msg.payload** is sent.

Optionally the new line character used to split the input can be appended to every message sent out to the serial port.