C++ talking to PIC16F877A via serial

Hey people, this is a robotics question as such but im having a bit of a problem with getting a C++ program, running in cygwin (on windows xp), to chat with a navigation controller (running on a PIC16F877A).

How can i access and read from/write to the serial port (COM1) inside cygwin?!?! I can use the standard terminal program in windows and it (the PIC) recieves and echos back any characters that i send.

if this is WAAAAY off topic for the board then i apologise :s

Are you refering to writting an application that talks to the serial port that is compiled using gcc?

A simple goolgle search will yeild windows code to talk to the serial ports.
I have used serial ports in MFC applications and under linux but not using cygwin under windows.

Yer i am compiling using g++ (so yes gcc). I find LOADS of stuff concerning visual C++ and things but i am coding in just straight C++ at the command line, not a windows app etc...

Are you stuck to C++? I've used a free compiler called LCC-Win32 which allows windows program, it's ANSI C though.

Sceadwian said:

Are you stuck to C++? I've used a free compiler called LCC-Win32 which allows windows program, it's ANSI C though.

Click to expand...

Yer im kinda restricted to using g++ (gcc). The administrator is jammed so far up his own A$$ that he wont even tell me if i can install a USB driver for my camera (a nice 2 minute job!), let alone let us use a different compiler!

Given that Cygwin imitates a unix environment, I'd think that UNIX code would do the job. I haven't tried it with Cygwin, but I think you need to execute the standard termios (and maybe ioctl) commands to the "file" in /dev/ that points to your serial port. The commands are confusing but I've managed to get code to work based on sample C code that I've found, I just have not tried it under Windows yet.

Another possibility is Python. I don't know if Cygwin includes Python, but there is dirt-simple cross-platform code (it's less than 10 lines of code) to make python scripts to perform serial I/O. Then you can possibly call those scripts within C++.