Troi releases Troi Serial Plug-in 6.0 for FileMaker Pro 18

[Diana Budding]

Serial port plug-in updated for FileMaker 18

Alphen aan den Rijn, the Netherlands, September 4, 2019–Troi today announced the immediate availability of Troi Serial Plug-in 6.0 for FileMaker Pro 18.

Peter Baanen, company president, states: “With the rise of the Internet of Things it’s amazing that the Serial Port Interface is still used in a lot of hardware or virtually over USB. We are proud to make connecting FileMaker Pro to the serial world even easier.”

What is Troi Serial Plug-in?

Troi Serial Plug-in gives FileMaker Pro easy and powerful access to external devices with a serial interface:

• read from and write to the (virtual) serial ports of the computer directly from FileMaker Pro without the need of a separate application
• native FileMaker script triggering, to get incoming data into the database
• “Suspend/Resume Serial Port” script step to temporarily suspend the incoming data stream and resume it when you are interested in the data
• “Wait for Match” function to wait for a specific text before triggering
• the possibility to open an unlimited number of serial ports and to trigger different scripts for different ports

What is new in version 6.0?

Troi Serial Plug-in 6.0 has the following changes:

• Tested and made compatible with FileMaker Pro 18 and FileMaker Pro 17.0.7.
• Improved the Open Serial Port script step and the Serial_Open function. You can now easily specify a match string as an optional parameter. In that case the plug-in will wait to trigger a script until the incoming data contains the match string.
• Added an extra Switches parameter to the Receive Serial Data script step, allowing to specify advanced switches.
• Significantly improved the Terminal.fmp12 example file, it is now optimized for FileMaker Pro 16 to 18 and demonstrates the more advanced features of Troi Serial Plug-in 6.
• (macOS) Improved the Open Serial Port script step and the Serial_Open function: when reopening the port existing data still in the buffer of the operating system is now flushed. This prevents receiving stale data.

Troi Serial Plug-in 6.0 also has the following improvements:

• Renamed the “Set Serial Dispatch Script” step to Set Serial Trigger Script.
• Fixed a possible crash when shutting down the plug-in or disabling it in the preferences, which could sometimes occur if you had several serial ports still open when stopping FileMaker Pro.
• (macOS) Fixed a potential memory leak in the Open Serial Port script step and the Serial_Open function. Also improved the Serial_Open function: when a serial port is in use the plug-in now returns the expected error code $$-97 (portInUse) instead of $$16.
• Fixed a possible crash in the Receive Serial Data script step with the parameter Encoding set to UTF-8: when receiving data which contains an invalid UTF-8 character sequence the plug-in no longer crashes, but will now indicate the invalid UTF-8 characters with the string <INVALID UTF8>.
• Modernized the Regifunc.fmp12 and EasyInstallTroiPlugins.fmp12 example files.

More detailed information on all changes and improvements implemented in Troi Serial Plug-in 6.0 can be found on the Serial Plug-in page.

Pricing & Availability

A fully functional demo version of Troi Serial Plug-in 6.0 is available on the Serial Plug-in page.

A cross platform developer license costs US$ 999. Details can be found on the Serial Plug-in page. You can order licenses there or from our shop.

Upgrade information

Version 6.0 uses a new v6 registration code. The upgrade is free for users who bought a license for Troi Serial Plug-in on or after August 6, 2018. Eligible users will be sent a new v6 registration. Contact us if you have not received yours after September 5, 2019.

Upgrades from a cross platform developer license bought before August 6, 2018 are available from US$ 399. You can order upgrades from the Serial Plug-in page or from our shop.