I've been wanting to make an app that sends instructions over serial to my LED controller. For this to work, I need to read what the controller sends back after sending it a command. I found the following function in ORSSerialPort:
func serialPort(_ serialPort: ORSSerialPort, didReceive data: Data) {
// Do things
}
However, is there something like ORSSerialPort.read()?
I don't think ORSSerialPort.read() is a good idea. I know some other serial libraries are written that way, but the only way for that to work is for read() to block (possibly with a timeout) until a byte comes in on the port. Blocking I/O makes it a lot harder to write a good, responsive app, and I want to guide developers using ORSSerialPort away from that approach.
Instead, you should indeed implement serialPort(_:, didReceive:) in your ORSSerialPort delegate. When data is received by the serial port, that method will be called with the received data and you can do whatever you'd like with it.
That said, if your device communicates using a command/response type protocol (ie. every time you send a command, the device sends some response), you ought to look at ORSSerialPort's request/response API. It allows you to explicitly define the format of expected responses to commands, and ORSSerialPort itself will handle asynchronously waiting for, parsing, and validating responses. See the documentation for more info about this part of ORSSerialPort. The library also includes a sample project, RequestResponseDemo, that demonstrates using this API. Both Swift and Objective-C versions are included.