Question

This is related to my question asked here today on SO. Is there a better way to build a packet to send over serial rather than doing this:

unsigned char buff[255];

buff[0] = 0x02
buff[1] = 0x01
buff[2] = 0x03

WriteFile(.., buff,3, &dwBytesWrite,..);

Note: I have about twenty commands to send, so if there was a better way to send these bytes to the serial device in a more concise manner rather than having to specify each byte, it would be great. Each byte is hexadecimal, with the last byte being the checksum. I should clarify that I know I will have to specify each byte to build the commands, but is there a better way than having to specify each array position?

Answer 1

You can initialize static buffers like so:

const unsigned char command[] = {0x13, 0x37, 0xf0, 0x0d};

You could even use these to initialize non-const buffers and then replace only changing bytes by index.