Serial Macro Extensions

This plugin provides methods to talk to a device attached to a serial port, directly from the ImageJ Macro language, using the Macro Extension mechanism. You can easily:

• list the available serial ports
• establish a serial connection
• check if the serial connection is alive
• send commands over the serial connection
• recieve what is available from the serial port
• close the connection

It works with any serial device, but was developped to talk with the Arduino board, an open-source electronics prototyping platform (http://arduino.cc/).

• IJSerial plugin (http://www.eslide.net/) can also be used, but it requires a separate config file, and does not provide persistence to the serial connection.

Jérôme Mutterer, Tom Mueller, Graeme Awcock, Michael Schmid

• Requires RXTX library
• 2018-10-8 (MIFOBIO2018): a working RXTX version for Windows 64-bit systems was obtained from http://fizzed.com/oss/rxtx-for-java. Copy RXTXcomm.jar to jre/lib/ext/ and rxtxSerial.dll and rxtxParallel.dll to jre/bin
• Download serial_ext.jar to the plugins folder
• Restart ImageJ

• Install RXTX according to http://rxtx.qbang.org/wiki/index.php/Installation
• Download serial_ext.jar to the plugins folder
• Restart ImageJ

• Make the macro interpreter aware of the new extensions:

run("serial ext");

• Get a list of available serial ports:

ports = Ext.ports();

• Establish a serial connection to the serial device, using COM8 port and a bitrate of 9600 bps:

Ext.open("COM8",9600,""); // this is enough e.g. for the Arduino, defaults parameters are DATABITS_8,STOPBITS_1,PARITY_NONE

Ext.open("COM1",14400,"DATABITS_8 STOPBITS_2 PARITY_ODD"); // advanced serial port configuration

// Available options

// DEFAULT: 8 data bits, 1 stop bit, no parity
 
// Databits:
// DATABITS_5
// DATABITS_6
// DATABITS_7
// DATABITS_8

// Stopbits:
// STOPBITS_1
// STOPBITS_2
// STOPBITS_1_5

// Parity:
// PARITY_NONE
// PARITY_EVEN
// PARITY_ODD
// PARITY_MARK
// PARITY_SPACE

• Read what the serial device sends:

data = Ext.read();

• Send a string command to the serial device:

Ext.write("a");

• Close the active serial port:

Ext.close();

• Poll if a serial connection is already there:

active = Ext.alive();
// returns "0" or "1"

• Install RXTX Library (http://rxtx.qbang.org/).

• 2018-10-8 (MIFOBIO2018): a working RXTX version for Windows 64-bit systems was obtained from http://fizzed.com/oss/rxtx-for-java. Copy RXTXcomm.jar to jre/lib/ext/ and rxtxSerial.dll and rxtxParallel.dll to jre/bin
• Download serial_ext.jar to the plugins folder

• 0.12 : GA and MS fixed a byte encoding issue.