serial

This is a fairly polished serial io patch (both smokris and I have been hacking on it mercilessly for the past day or two for an upcoming project)

Input and Output has been varified with an Arduino Diecimila at a few different baud rates (9600, 38400) with success. Binary output works (was added several betas ago, didn't get personally tested by me till today ;).

However, as is the case with all things kineme, we've hit upon a pretty nasty driver bug with ftdi (not surprised). I'm working with one of their techs to resolve this issue, hopefully that'll be fruitful.

The problem is basically this: Opening the serial port but never reading from it eventually causes some buffer overflows in the kernel. This causes some annoying side effects if you don't catch it soon enough. So if you have a Serial Output patch in the composition, you should add a matching Serial Input patch (with a specified break string!), and send its output to some red patch (a zero-count iterator is a cheap data sink). This will cause it to read out the buffer, averting the potential overflow (which shouldn't happen anyway).

This is close to a production release; please hammer on it, and find any weird corner cases where it doesn't work as expected (breakstring-less input will stop at 1 million bytes, then it'll probably trigger the overflow as noted above. This is the only known misfeature presently).