Writing a Python/C program to get UART data in your code

While Minicom might be fine for real-time communication with a device, if you need something to continuously talk to your device or react when a certain message is received, you'll want to put together an application for that. Python of course has great libraries for serial communication, which makes it a good choice for managing or automating communication between two devices.

Getting ready

The previous recipe gets you set up for serial communication by freeing up the serial port bindings and virtual console for incoming serial communication. If you have finished the first recipe, you can use the same configuration to try out communication with serial.

How to do it...

Python can work with serial connections with a library named-you guessed it-serial! For this recipe, we will just perform a simple test to open and close the connection via serial.

Here, we will run a few commands to initialize, open, and view the status of the serial connection...