Hello all,
Spending some time noodling around what are common interface issues for things like industrial and laboratory sensor integration, one of the common pain points is retrofitting existing equipment. Most offer some sort of serial interface, most commonly RS232. The problem is that to integrate these sort of devices, typically you need someone like ourselves to come in and program a micro to talk to it properly. Often they require some command to elicit data, and then some formatting on the backend to do something useful with it.
I can't help but think that having a way to configure serial communications outside of a microcontroller would be quite useful. For example, if from a browser connected to a gateway you could send commands to a serial port on a moteino and read the response, broken up in 61-character messages, of course. You'd need a cheap-o logic-level converter for most devices, but aside from that it seems as simple as some modular code and software serial. You could then configure a standard command sequence and code to format the response. For example, if your device wants to see 'R<cr>' before it sends data, you could configure the remote moteino to send that command and send the response back.
Just an idea.
C