[fpc-pascal] Serial to TCP gateway in FPC?

[Bo Berglund]

On Wed, 21 Jun 2017 08:02:00 +0000, Mark Morgan Lloyd
<markMLl.fpc-pascal at telemetry.co.uk> wrote:

>> What about Linux (Raspberry Pi)? Is the com port name simply ttyUSB1or do I have to use the full /dev/ttyUSB1?
>
>You *definitely* have to use the name as given. You're opening a file in 
>the filesystem tree, not an internally-reserved name.

OK,
thanks!
I am now creating a super-simple proxy app which will open a serial
port and connect to a TCP server. Then it will send all incoming data
on the serial port to the TCP server and all incoming TCP server data
back to the serial port.

Right now I am doing a Lazarus GUI app on Windows, but eventually I
will move the code into a command line app.

I have used the serial unit in FPC to handle the serial port
connection and am now looking for the TCP Client component to use.

I have used Indy's TIdTcpClient in the past, but it required me to
create a thread to handle the data transfers, and I don't really like
complicating matters like that for this (seemingly) simple project.
I looked at the socket unit, which has the advantage that it is part
of FPC. But the documentation is very confusing...
For example I was looking at fpconnect:
https://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/rtl/sockets/fpconnect.html
and noted that the example does NOT use fpconnect at all, instead it
uses a depreciated Connect method with strange arguments...
Is there some updated documentation somewhere?

Anyway:
The functions of this proxy app are only:
- Open the specified serial port and set it to the required baudrate
- Open a connection to the TCP server port
- Now somehow run a loop as follows:
  - Serial data available? If so read them and send to the TCP server
  - TCP data available? If so read and send through the serial port
  - Stop condition set? If so close down TCP and serial connections
    and exit the program. (Don't know how this will work)
  - Repeat loop again

Two issues here:
1) How do I enter a loop in a GUI application? In a command line
application it is just going to be part of he main program code.

2) How do I stop the program from running at 100% CPU utilization (on
Windows)?

And of course how to use the sockets unit properly?


-- 
Bo Berglund
Developer in Sweden