Hello Monks, I'm having troubles in getting a binary stream out of a RS232 device in my code. I know that the messages are all 14 bytes long. THeir structure is clear and are sent each 250ms. I wrote below code but problem is that I get absolutely no output on the console. If I remove the infinite loop, I get the first message and can process it but as I'm looking for a data logger feature it's useless :-) My code is below. Anybody can tell me what I should change/do/read/etc. to make it happen? Thanks! 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
#

use strict;
use warnings;
use threads;
use Thread::Queue;
use Win32::SerialPort;
use Data::Dump qw(dump);


# GLOBALS
my %CONFIG = (
    ReaderCOMPort => "COM56",
    ReaderCOMPortOpen => 1,
    testTime => 5 # testing time in seconds
);

<readmore>
my $ob;


# Initialize the serial port of the reader
initRS232();

$ob->read_interval(250);
$ob->read_const_time(10000);

$ob->lookclear;
while (1) {
    my ($count, $str) = $ob->read(14);
    DumpString($str);
    sleep 1;
}


undef $ob;

exit;



sub initRS232 {
    
    eval { 
        $ob = Win32::SerialPort->new ($CONFIG{ReaderCOMPort}); #  || r
+eturn "Can't open $PortName: $^E\n"
        };
    if($@) {
        # We know it died, but is it an object or a 
        # printable message?
        if( ref $@ ) {
            # Assume it's an exception object. Not a 
            # great way to do it, but it works.
            #
            # Now, what kind of exception is it?
            #
            if( $@->isa( 'IOException' ) ) {

            }
            elsif( $@->isa( 'OtherException' ) ) {

            }
            else {

            }
        }
        else {
            # Assume it's an error string

        }
    }
    
    
    $CONFIG{ReaderCOMPortOpen} = 1;
    $ob->user_msg(1);     # misc. warnings
    $ob->error_msg(1);     # hardware and data errors

    $ob->baudrate(2400);
    $ob->parity("none");
    $ob->parity_enable(1);     # for any parity except "none"
    $ob->databits(8);
    $ob->stopbits(1);
    #$ob->xon_limit(20);      # bytes left in buffer
    #$ob->xoff_limit(100);     # space left in buffer

    $ob->write_settings;
    $ob->save("tekpower.cfg");

    #$ob->are_match("\xE8");
}

# dump the contents of a string as decimal and hex bytes and character
+s
sub DumpString {
    my @a = unpack('C*',$_[0]);
    my $o = 0;
    while (@a) {
        my @b = splice @a,0,16;
        my @d = map sprintf("%03d",$_), @b;
        my @x = map sprintf("%02x",$_), @b;
        my $c = substr($_[0],$o,16);
        $c =~ s/[[:^print:]]/ /g;
        printf "%6d %s\n",$o,join(' ',@d);
        print " "x8,join('  ',@x),"\n";
        print " "x9,join('   ',split(//,$c)),"\n";
        $o += 16;
    }
}
</readmore>

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In reply to Blocking on serial port! by jabidof

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