[Lazarus] Usage of Serial in a testing program?

[Bo Berglund]

I am writing a testing application for checking out a TCP to Serial
bridge component. I am using Lazarus 1.8.0 and fpc 3.0.4 on Windows 7

For the serial port handling I found the "built-in" Serial unit
described here:
http://wiki.freepascal.org/Hardware_Access#FPC_built_in_Serial_unit

Now I have a few questions about its usage:

1) Serial port name
-------------------
When opening the port the example does this:

str(ComPortNr,tmpstr);
ComPortName:= 'COM'+tmpstr+':';
serialhandle := SerOpen(ComPortName);

So for say port 29 this results in ComPortName 'COM29:'
Is this always the case? I have a hunch that for port numbers 1..9 the
Windows port naming is different than for higher port numbers...

And if I want to port this to Linux, I guess thta the name is
completely different, but no hint is given.

2) Blocking send?
------------------
Is this port blocking for sending?

The example has this:

status := SerWrite(serialhandle, s[1], writecount );

where s is a string holding the text to send (I will actually need to
use a TBytes array instead) and writecount returns the bytes actually
sent.

If I want to send an array of say 100 kbytes at 9600 baud, will the
call return only when the data have been completely sent or earlier?
It will take about 100 seconds to send that array...

3) Receiving data
----------------
For data reception I see this:

s:='';
ComIn:='';
while (Length(Comin)<10) and (status>=0) and not keypressed do 
begin
   status:= SerRead(serialhandle, s[1], 10);
   ...

Since the call parameters are the receive buffer and the count to read
I do not understand how this can work. s has been emptied (length = 0)
just before the call so how can SerRead stuff any data into the buffer
starting at s[1], which should not even exist???

I would like to have a way to read incoming data asynchronously so I
also could handle the user feedback and the TCP connection which is
sending the data that ultimately will arrive on the serial line...

Any suggestions on how to do this?


-- 
Bo Berglund
Developer in Sweden