ASTM 1381-02 Serial Interfacing with Medical Lab equipment

Question

Has anybody successfully interfaced Medical Lab devices like Cell Counters /ABG instruments to mirth connect using ASTM 1381-02 or similar protocols over serial port. I am working on a small project. I need the data transmitted by the machine in ASTM format to a text file/ to a database and I cannot afford to pay $30000 for mirth commercial support. I need a low cost or open source solution.

I was expecting MLLP listener to be off use but it seems to work with TCP and I have to make it work purely on serial communication.

Secondly I tried writing ASTM serial data receiver in Java. But control characters such as ACK, STX, ETX, ETB, and other delimiters are not visible in terminals be it in Win 7 cmd or Netbeans/Eclipse console. Making me helpless in parsing the data.

Any help will in right direction be deeply appreciated.

Answer 1

If you are under Linux environment you may use COM port redirector to a given TCP port and use Mirth's TCP Listener to intercept that flow.

E.g., to pipe the serial port through netcat: netcat ipaddress port < /dev/ttyS0

Or using socat: socat pty,link=/dev/virtualcom0,raw tcp:ipaddress:port&

(check for correct parameters)