Laszlo Papp - Thursday, February 14, 2013
QtSerialPort in Qt 5.1I would like to introduce you to a project I have been working on lately under the Qt Project umbrella. Hope, you find it useful.
History The serial port technology is quite old, but still in active use today. It is mostly used for communicating with modems, sending control commands and so forth where the universal serial bus is not necessary. I am sure many of you recall the time when soldering the pins and cable manually to get it right for the embedded boards. :-)
About a year ago, I was looking for a library for my project to handle the serial port communication with the modems I needed. As I had been about to make a touch friendly UI with QML, I thought it would have been nice to have a Qt solution. It would have been phantastic to communicate with the modem on my Windows, or Linux host.
There has been an old library around for a while, called QExtSerialPort. Unfortunately, its API looked weird and the project had been abandoned for a while without people contributing to it. Then, a chinese person began to fix certain issues, but still: the design had been carried for long from the old ages.
Qt Project PlaygroundThe Qt Project established a nice opportunity for contributors to start a new project, or move an existing to the Playground area. There was a discussion on the development mailing list to figure out the rules for handling this. Around the time, when I requested the QtAudio3D project into the Playground area of the Qt Project, there was a russian person, Denis, who initiated a community project into Playground in his own pastime to make a great developer experience for serial port based projects across platforms.
The library was supporting only Qt5 back then, and my project was based on Qt4. This is understandable as Qt5 was not realeased for the time, so we were unable to take the risks of the moving target. I decided to give the project a go and make support for Qt4. Not much later (i.e. 1-2 weeks), I got the first changes into the Qt Project, following the Gerrit workflow. By that time, it was more or less possible to use QtSerialPort with Qt4.
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