AClient will not work on Windows

[RobertBaruch]

TLDR: Unless you're a Windows expert and know how to fix this, explicitly document that we do not support Windows.

AClient needs to open a COM port, but on Windows you need Administrator privilege to do that. And apparently even when you run a python script under Admin, it still refuses to open a com port, with error "Permission denied".

To test this, open a command prompt as admin (right click on command prompt, open as administrator), run python, and:

import os os.open("\\.\COM", os.O_RDWR)

(Yes, you need all that backslash magic because Windows)

That will actually work. However, running otl866 will not, because otl866 is an exe, and I guess Windows trashes the permissions.

[JohnDMcMaster]

The core functions should abstract pexepect under the hood pretty well. I imagine we could write a generic pexpect replacement pretty easily just using pyserial read() and buffering it ourselves. The biggest drawback would be that we'd loose select and consume more CPU (at least on Windows)

[JohnDMcMaster]

Can we consolidate the other issues into this one? Seems like the core issue, and having the others open may make this difficult to track

[RobertBaruch]

Well, I think this is really the only issue -- opening a COM port on Windows in Python via a script installed through setup.py -- and it's a bit of a tough nut to crack. Apparently even my Google-fu isn't good enough to find a workable solution to this one.

I've closed the other issue #67 .