USB Serial COM Ports and Python

I was working with a simple device that provides data via USB Serial COM. For whatever reason, the C++ library I was using to read from the device was not working consistently on different machines.

USB Serial COM is akin to socket programming. The routines are somewhat platform-dependent, and today's developer doesn't usually care about the details. Just give me an abstraction that lets me communicate!

Then I realized that Python has PySerial. Using this library, I was easily able to communicate with the device, and send it via localhost socket to my C++ program. Done and done.

Check out the super simple source code:

 import serial  
 import socket  
   
 IP="127.0.0.1"  
 PORT=3001  
 sock=socket.socket(socket.AF_INET,socket.SOCK_DGRAM) #Sending data to localhost via UDP  
   
 ser= serial.Serial(2,timeout=2) #COM3 is port number 2.  
 print ser.name  
 line=''  
 while (True):  
      line=ser.readline()  
      print line  
      sock.sendto(line,(IP,PORT))  

Python for the win.