forwarding a serial port

I also received an answer from Fabien of Stellarium Labs on my Stellarium Mobile Plus app's ability to control a mount.

If you have your laptop connected to the mount, the easiest is to forward the serial port on a TCP/IP socket on which Stellarium Plus will be able to connect.

Oh ho. Good to know.

He said that on Linux (and maybe on the Mac), one can do this just by running this command in a terminal:

socat TCP-LISTEN:10000,fork,reuseaddr FILE:/dev/ttyUSB0,b9600,raw,echo=0

Then the user would tell SMP to connect to the laptop IP on port 10000.