arduino best serial communication solution

Question

During the last two days I was googling and searching about serial communication tools for Arduino.

I found a lot of tools like :

• Node.js through node-serialport
• Python through pyserial
• Javascript through breakoutkjs using Frimata

So from your experience which is the best one of these and why ?

Answer 1

The only one I've used was the python approach. It worked very well for a standalone application which read data from the arduino's serial port and used a somewhat advanced GUI application to display this data back to the end user.

This is particularly useful if you just want to add flare to an embedded project where you're gathering data from a sensor. See here for a basic example.

Given that I haven't tried the other two I can't really comment on which is best, but I will say that since I already had python installed, it took me about 30 minutes to get a working setup where I printed a value over serial to the PC and then had a 'real-time' graph of it on my monitor. Also, given how many awesome scientific libraries there are for python through numpy I can't imagine there would be any data/signal processing that you wouldn't be able to do in python. So those are both two huge pluses for the python route in my book.

Best of luck.

Answer 2

I haven't used any of the tools/libraries you linked to. But in my opinion serial communication is easy enough on the pc side, so you should grab a library for you favorite programming language and use it. When you are not pleased with it, grab another.

When it comes to serial communication I either build a small program in C# (Serial library included in the .net-framework) or use PuTTY, when I just want to send/receive simple text messages.

PuTTY is not a library, but a standalone program.

For debugging purposes (sending info messages via the serial port) I prefer PuTTY, because it is simpler than programming a seperate tool.

Answer 3

If you are using the Arduino IDE, you can also use the serial monitor to read the values the Arduino is spitting out over your COM port. AFAIK, you can only read values this way.

Courtesy of Ladyada

Though I personally really like PuTTY.

• Yahya Tawil: thank you but I'm talking about an application use serial communication to read/write from/to arduino , standalone without IDE

Answer 4

I mostly use Perl and Device::SerialPort to access an Arduino from my Linux PC. The Windows alternative for this is Win32::SerialPort. I have a simple example here to read the serial port: http://wirespeed.xs4all.nl/mediawiki/index.php/Cat_ttyUSB

Answer 5

I like to use Processing. It has a built in serial communication library that makes it pretty simple to connect to the device and read and write data with it. If you're writing code for the arduino, you already know how to write code in processing. The IDE will look very similar too. This is not a coincidence.