How do you use minicom with stdin and stdout?

I need to communicate with Python over a USB to RS-232 converter, to a device. The application minicom connects seamlessly, so if I could run that in non-interactive mode, everything would would be great. Reading the documentation there are some interesting options, but I'm not fully understanding any one of them: -t Terminal type. With this flag, you can override the environment TERM variable. -S script. Run the named script at startup. How do I pipe data between my application and minicom? Should I use something else?