Serial communication is the most common low-level protocol for communicating between two or more devices. Normally, one device is a computer, while the other device can be a modem, a printer, Arduino^® hardware, another computer, or a scientific instrument such as an oscilloscope or a function generator. For many serial port applications, you can communicate with your instrument without detailed knowledge of how the serial port works. Communication through a serial port is established with a serialport object, which you create in the MATLAB^® workspace. For information about creating a serialport object, see Create Serial Port Object.

Before you can write or read data, the serialport object and the instrument must have identical communication settings. For information, see Configure Serial Port Communication Settings.