Ok, the title is a bit misleading. Like most things in life, it really isn’t infinite. But I’m going to show you how you can use a very interesting Linux feature to turn one serial port from a microcontroller into a bunch of virtual ports. In theory, you could create over 200 ports, but the reality is you will probably want to stick with fewer.
The feature in question is what’s known as pseudoterminal or sometimes a pty or pts. These special files were made to feed data to programs that expect to accept data from a terminal. The files provide two faces. To the client, it looks like any other terminal device. To the creator, though, it is just another file. What you write to that file goes to the fake terminal and you can read anything that is sent from the program connected to the terminal. You use these all the time, probably, without realizing it since running a shell under X Windows, for example, doesn’t attach to a real terminal, after all.
You could, of course, do the same trick with a composite USB device, assuming you have one. Also assuming you can find a working driver and get it working. However, many microcontrollers have a serial port — even one with a USB converter built-in — but fewer have full-blown USB hardware. Even the ones that do are often at odds with strange drivers on the PC side. Serial ports work and work well even on the simplest microcontrollers.
The Plan
The plan is simple enough. A Linux program listens to a real serial port and watches for special character sequences in the data stream. Those sequences will allow you to switch data so that the data stream will go to a particular terminal. Data coming back from the terminals will go to the real serial port after sending a sequence that identifies its source.
