[Haskell-cafe] Serial Communications in Haskell

[Esa Ilari Vuokko]

On 8/29/07, Ronald Guida <ronguida at mindspring.com> wrote:
> I'm on a Windows box and I'm looking for a way to talk to a serial
> port (for example, RS-232) from Haskell.  I couldn't find a library to
> do this, so I am wondering how to create one.
>
> I have a fairly thorough understanding of how to open and use a serial
> port with the Windows API.  In particular, to open a serial port, I

At the moment, I think it is easier to just use the same Windows API directly,
rather than try to bend GHC's IO system to do it "right".

> have to use CreateFile, which is the same API call that opens files.
> In fact, if I call openFile from GHC, and pass "COM1:" as the
> filename, then I can get a writable serial port.
>
>  > module Serial
>  >     where
>  > import System.IO
>  >
>  > main = do
>  >   h <- openFile "COM1:" ReadWriteMode
>  >   hPutStrLn h "Hello World"
>
> I can't read from the port (I always get an immediate EOF), and I have
> no way of configuring things like the baud rate or the parity
> settings.  Nevertheless, this demonstrates that openFile can at least
> open the serial port.
>
> What I would like to do is create some functions that would allow me
> to open and configure a serial port, and get a Handle back so that I
> can use the existing IO functions like hGetChar and hPutChar.  I am
> assuming that hGetChar eventually calls win32::ReadFile and hPutChar
> eventually calls win32::WriteFile.  These same two API calls would
> work for serial ports.

Unfortunately, it goes via extra hoops and uses c runtime instead of
Windows API directly.  This extra layer makes sure it's hard to predict
exactly what gets done (and with what options) sometimes.

And even if it did, it'd probably use overlapping io, does that work with
COM ports?

> In Windows, there are 23 API functions that apply specifically to
> serial ports.  Out of these 23 functions, only a few of them are
> actually necessary if I just want to send and receive data.
>
> Of course, I don't know how to call Windows API functions from Haskell,
> and I have no idea how to hook things to the IO library so that I can
> use a Handle for a serial port.  I'm looking for some advice on how to
> proceed.

I haven't done much work on COM ports, but the little I did, I used bindings
in Win32 and probably some of my own, and didn't use System.IO/Handle
at all.  Maybe problems with GHC's IO system are easy to solve, but I have
no idea and wasn't inclined to find out.

Best regards,
Esa