Re: USB to serial "coupler"?

I've got an old (compiled, no source code) application that requires a GPS connection on a serial port. Of course, none of our field laptops have anything like that - it's all USB these days. What I need is some kind of a "bridge" daemon that will read the NMEA-0183 sentences from the USB port and write them to the serial port.

Write them to the serial port? There isn't any, if your laptop doesn't have a serial port. Your GPS mouse is USB, isn't it? So it should show up as /dev/ttyUSB0 or such and be handled by the usbserial kernel module. All you need to do is to soft-link the USB device file to the one your legacy application expects, e.g. ln -s /dev/ttyUSB0 /dev/ttyS0

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Re^2: USB to serial "coupler"? by Anonymous Monk on Jan 01, 2009 at 20:39 UTC
When I said "write them to the serial port", I didn't mean "shove them out through some non-existent pins in a non-existent D-type connector". I meant, "write the data to wherever the kernel will pick it up as data coming in via the serial port if it's possible." I'm probably making a bunch of stupid assumptions in saying that, but if I knew all those answers, I wouldn't be asking the questions, right? Your idea of linking the two implies that USB and serial ports share exactly the same protocol. I don't know if that's what you meant to imply, but - hell, I can't see any harm in trying it, so I'll give it a shot. At least it's a directions I hadn't thought about before. Thanks - I really appreciate that!	[reply]

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Re^2: USB to serial "coupler"?
by Anonymous Monk on Jan 01, 2009 at 20:39 UTC

When I said "write them to the serial port", I didn't mean "shove them out through some non-existent pins in a non-existent D-type connector". I meant, "write the data to wherever the kernel will pick it up as data coming in via the serial port if it's possible." I'm probably making a bunch of stupid assumptions in saying that, but if I knew all those answers, I wouldn't be asking the questions, right?

Your idea of linking the two implies that USB and serial ports share exactly the same protocol. I don't know if that's what you meant to imply, but - hell, I can't see any harm in trying it, so I'll give it a shot. At least it's a directions I hadn't thought about before. Thanks - I really appreciate that!

[reply]