I think I must have a fundamental misunderstanding of things here. Short story, trying to connect two serial devices and make them talk. For now, those devices are: (1) linux computer and (2) windows computer using python/pyserial.
I can run "echo 'a' > /dev/ttyUSB0" on (1) and receive it just fine on (2). The problem is receiving data on (1). The ultimate goal here is to continuously log the data coming into the serial port on (1).
So here's the misunderstanding part: I've read in multiple places that I should be able to type "cat /dev/ttyUSB0 > file.txt" to log the serial data. I would think that would continuously read/write whatever data comes into the serial port. That is not the case, at least here. What's happening is that I'll run cat as shown above on (1), and type/write things on (2) and I get nothing. I do however get what I sent over, or part of it, if I run cat a 2nd time.
What is actually supposed to happen? Is it supposed to continuously take characters from the serial port and store them to file.txt, or is it supposed to basically flush the input buffer once like I'm actually seeing? Any clues to what's going on here?
P.S. I've matched baud rates, flow control, etc. and switched the port to raw on (1) via "stty -F /dev/ttyUSB0 raw"