Serial port communication

[rlent]

We do some testing involving serial communications with a device. Right now, we are using Tera Term to communicate. I'd like to bypass the terminal program entirely and just have TestComplete send strings to the device and receive responses. Does anyone have any sample code of how I can do this?

[AlexKaras]

Hi,

I don't have ready code samples, but I am pretty sure such communication is possible with the help of the CLR Bridge from TestComplete.

Try to search for C# / VB.Net code samples and port them to your scripting language (e.g. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1243070/how-to-read-and-write-from-the-serial-port and http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13754694/what-is-the-correct-way-to-read-a-serial-port-using-net-...).

Code from https://support.smartbear.com/viewarticle/9003/ section can be used as an example.

In the worst case you may create a regular .Net class library that implements port communication that you need (with the assistance from your developers?) and just call methods of this library from your TestComplete code via the mentioned CLR Bridge.

[sanjay0288]

Hi,

   Wanted to know how would you read the response? Will you be reading the response from the port directly or is there any change/ data coming to your application UI

[sanjay0288]

Hi @rlent

  The below smartbear link might be of some help.

https://support.smartbear.com/testcomplete/docs/scripting/working-with/com-ports.html?q=Serial+port#...

Below is the sample VB Script code which is taken from the link

Sub Test
  Dim Port, i, s

  Set Port = dotNET.System_IO_Ports.SerialPort.zctor_4("COM1", 9600)
  Port.Open

  ' Writing data to the port
  Port.Write "A " & Chr(27)
  ' Waiting for response
  aqUtils.Delay 1000
  ' Processing response
  If Port.BytesToRead <> 0 Then
    s = Port.ReadExisting
    Log.Message s
  Else
    Log.Warning "No data"
  End If

  Port.Close
End Sub

[jonan]

Hi,

I am trying to send data to a COM port and found the following solution in TestComplete website

https://support.smartbear.com/testcomplete/docs/scripting/working-with/com-ports.html

I used the following solution as described in the web page (Python). However, when I run my test

it gave an error Permission denied. Any idea on how to solve this error?

def TestCOMPort():
  ForWriting = 2;
  TriStateFalse = 0;
  
  fso = Sys.OleObject['Scripting.FileSystemObject']
  f = fso.OpenTextFile("COM1:", ForWriting, False, TriStateFalse)
  # Write data to the port
  f.Write("A")
  f.Write(" ")
  f.Write("\x1B")
  f.Close()

[AlexKaras]

Hi,

a) What line of code produces the error?

b) Does this help: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1153547/access-to-the-port-com1-is-denied ?

[jonan]

Hi Alex,

The error was permission denied.

Anyways, I solved this problem by just issuing a command on window cmd line to write character to a certain port by defining the following in my scripts.

def connectDevice():

cmd = "echo d > COM7"
os.system(cmd)
# Delay 10s
Delay(10000)

return

Thanks for the reply.