Serial ports provide an easy way to communicate between many types of hardware and your computer. They are relatively simple to use and are very common among peripherals and especially DIY projects. Many platforms such as Arduino have built in serial communication so they are really easy to set up and use. Many times you may want your project to communicate with your computer in order to have a cool interactive output, a neat sensor that passes data to your computer, or anything else you could possibly dream up. In this tutorial, I will walk you through how to interface to a serial port on the computer side of things, using Microsoft's. Net framework.

The code examples in this tutorial are in C#, but can be easily transferred to Visual Basic, or Visual C++. This tutorial assumes that you have a very basic understanding of object oriented programing, and whatever language you choose to program in. Since we are mainly going to be using the System.IO.Ports.SerialPort class, is a link to the full documentation by MSDN if you want to check out the rest of the class.

I also found a explaining how to fix several common bugs relating to serial ports. Check it out if you get stuck with any odd errors. Feel free to post questions or feedback! Voxengo Span Plus Serial there. I am always happy to hear constructive comments so I can make improvements. Now that we have created our serial port object and opened the port, we now want to read from the serial port.