Reading from serial port with while-loop - go

Question

I’ve written a short program in Go to communicate with a sensor through a serial port:
package main
import (
"fmt"
"github.com/tarm/goserial"
"time"
)
func main() {
c := &serial.Config{Name: "/dev/ttyUSB0", Baud: 9600}
s, err := serial.OpenPort(c)
if err != nil {
fmt.Println(err)
}
_, err = s.Write([]byte("\x16\x02N0C0 G A\x03\x0d\x0a"))
if err != nil {
fmt.Println(err)
}
time.Sleep(time.Second/2)
buf := make([]byte, 40)
n, err := s.Read(buf)
if err != nil {
fmt.Println(err)
}
fmt.Println(string(buf[:n]))
s.Close()
}
It works fine, but after writing to the port I have to wait about half a second before I can start reading from it. I would like to use a while-loop instead of time.Sleep to read all incoming data. My attempt doesn’t work:
buf := make([]byte, 40)
n := 0
for {
n, _ := s.Read(buf)
if n > 0 {
break
}
}
fmt.Println(string(buf[:n]))
I guess buf gets overwritten after every loop pass. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Your problem is that Read() will return whenever it has some data - it won't wait for all the data. See the io.Reader specification for more info
What you want to do is read until you reach some delimiter. I don't know exactly what format you are trying to use, but it looks like maybe \x0a is the end delimiter.
In which case you would use a bufio.Reader like this
reader := bufio.NewReader(s)
reply, err := reader.ReadBytes('\x0a')
if err != nil {
panic(err)
}
fmt.Println(reply)
Which will read data until the first \x0a.

Answer 2

I guess buf gets overwritten after every loop pass. Any suggestions?
Yes, buf will get overwritten with every call to Read().
A timeout on the file handle would be the approach I would take.
s, _ := os.OpenFile("/dev/ttyS0", syscall.O_RDWR|syscall.O_NOCTTY|syscall.O_NONBLOCK, 0666)
t := syscall.Termios{
Iflag: syscall.IGNPAR,
Cflag: syscall.CS8 | syscall.CREAD | syscall.CLOCAL | syscall.B115200,
Cc: [32]uint8{syscall.VMIN: 0, syscall.VTIME: uint8(20)}, //2.0s timeout
Ispeed: syscall.B115200,
Ospeed: syscall.B115200,
}
// syscall
syscall.Syscall6(syscall.SYS_IOCTL, uintptr(s.Fd()),
uintptr(syscall.TCSETS), uintptr(unsafe.Pointer(&t)),
0, 0, 0)
// Send message
n, _ := s.Write([]byte("Test message"))
// Receive reply
for {
buf := make([]byte, 128)
n, err = s.Read(buf)
if err != nil { // err will equal io.EOF
break
}
fmt.Printf("%v\n", string(buf))
}
Also note, if there is no more data read and there is no error, os.File.Read() will return an error of io.EOF,
as you can see here.