Instrument Control Toolbox

Creating a Serial Port Object

You create a serial port object with the serial function. serial requires the name of the serial port connected to your device as an input argument. As described in Configuring Property Values, you can also configure property values during object creation.

Each serial port object is associated with one serial port. For example, to create a serial port object associated with the COM1 port:

• s = serial('COM1');
  

The serial port object s now exists in the MATLAB workspace. You can display the class of s with the whos command.

• whos s
    Name      Size         Bytes  Class
  
    s         1x1            512  serial object
  
  Grand total is 11 elements using 512 bytes
  

Once the serial port object is created, the properties listed below are automatically assigned values. These general purpose properties provide descriptive information about the serial port object based on the object type and the serial port.

Table 5-3: Serial Port Descriptive Properties 

Property Name	Description
Name	Specify a descriptive name for the serial port object.
Port	Indicate the platform-specific serial port name.
Type	Indicate the object type.

You can display the values of these properties for s with the get function.

• get(s,{'Name','Port','Type'})
  ans = 
      'Serial-COM1'    'COM1'    'serial'
  

Finding Serial Port Information for Your Platform

The Serial Port Object Display