Cerial is a C-module to communicate over a serial connection.
It supports binary transmission of arbitrary data (struct, char[], ...).
Each data frame is transferred using start and end guards.
The data is escaped (if necessary) and validated against a basic checksum.
It works best if the serial communication always uses the same data structure. For example, a microcontroller that sends the same sensor data repeatedly. An example can be found in example.c.
- Simple interface with three functions: Cerial_init() / Cerial_read() / Cerial_write()
- Binary format reduces data transmission compared to ASCII
- Checksum helps to validate the received data
- Start and end of data can be distinguished from the message
- Liberal license for free and commercial software
Each message over the serial starts and ends with 0x00 (guards).
An escape byte 0xAA avoids confusion of the data bytes and the guards.
The last byte in each message is a checksum to validate the message.
| Byte | Description |
|---|---|
| 0x00 | Guard at the start and end of each message |
| 0xAA | Escape character (0xAA in data is escaped as 0xAA 0xAA) |
| 0xFF | Escaped guard character (0x00 in data is escaped as 0xAA 0xFF) |
Example:
If we want to send the following data message:
12 34 AA 56 00 78 FF 90
The following bytes will be sent over the serial connection:
00 12 34 AA AA 56 AA FF 78 FF 90 00