This part of the Arduino programming course shows how to get data into an Arduino sketch from the serial port. Data can be sent to the Arduino from the Serial Monitor window in the Arduino IDE. A user can enter data in the input field in the serial monitor window to send values and data to the Arduino. Arduino MEGA 2560 and Due. Both the MEGA 2560 and Due have 4 serial ports in total. One that connects through a USB port chip to the USB device port on the board and three extra serial ports that connect to pins on one of the pin headers of the board.

1. Arduino Ide Serial Terminal
2. Arduino Ide Serial Terminal
3. Arduino Serial Port Terminal
4. Arduino Terminal Serial Monitor

Nokia 5110 and Arduino mini make a great serial monitor that can easily be battery powered at 3 Volts.

Serial communication on pins TX/RX uses TTL logic levels (5V or 3.3V depending on the board). Don’t connect these pins directly to an RS232 serial port; they operate at +/. OK, my UNO is using 9600 8N1, and if I use the IDE's included serial terminal, everything works fine. If I use Minicom, set it to 9600 8N1, and try to send data to the UNO, nothing.

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About this project

Overview of project

I have found myself on several occasions away from a PC but needing a small serial Terminal / monitor to view the start-up diagnostics of one of my projects; the traditional boot-up health check. It is routine for me, after the main project is constructed and working, to add a little diagnostic code which uses the on board serial interface of Atmel chips such as the Atmega328P found in Uno, Mini, Mini Pro. Also, this is applicable to the Nano, Teensy, and 32u4 products from Adafruit and Sparkfun. If your project can afford the overhead of the extra code and the light demands of the serial output on the internal UART, then there is little concern for using the serial output.

I constructed this project from Chinese parts which totaled:
Mini Pro 328: .. $2.88 ea (delivered in Qty 5)
Nokia 5110: ..$2.61 ea (delivered in Qty 5)
Total cost for 5 units including shipping: $27.41Price each: .. $5.48

I will give equivalent links to U.S. power houses that stock similar items and stand-by-them with support and replacement guarantees:
Adafruit: $10.00Nokia 5110: http://www.adafruit.com/products/338 Sparkfun: $9.95Pro Mini 328 3.3V: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11114

To test my portable 3V self-contained serial 9600 BAUD terminal, I connected 2 AAA batteries and a 3.3V GPS with 9600 BAUD output. The success is seen in the lead-in picture and the YouTube video to the right.

Driver softwarewhich makes this happen, allows your hardware to function by communicating with the operating system. Technical Level: IntermediateSummaryWindows 10 continues the tradition of hardware compatibility by providing support for a vast collection of devices available within the Windows ecosystem. In this article, we take a look at installing and updating drivers in Windows 10.DetailsI recently installed Windows 10 on an HP Elitebook to see how well the most recent Windows 10 build performs. The Elitebook is a fairly recent model notebook which includes an assortment of hardware technologies. Hardware detection in particular is an important part of the out of the box experience. Microsoft windows 10 display driver.

The code is simple and you can extend it. It only manages newlines and carriage returns at the moment along with numerals and upper/lower case. But it is a hack.. and happily, it is totally open source and hack-able by you.

Arduino Ide Serial Terminal

Text-based electrical connections are listed in the Defines.h file of the ZIP, but the connections are identical to the Nokia display in my project: http://www.hackster.io/rayburne/magic-morse-on-arduino so you can use the Fritzing diagrams there if you prefer.

Have fun!

Ray

Source code for main program routine

Source ZIP (see Defines.h for electrical connections)

A note about 3.3V input to the Arduino

A 3 Volt Arduino allows for direct connection to 3 Volt devices such as the GPS I used as an example and it makes driving the 3V Nokia display a breeze.

But, if your serial line is 5 Volts, you will need to down convert the logic level to use on your 3V mini-terminal. There are many considerations and the topic is too convoluted (too many opinions) for me to explain everything here. So, educate yourself and select something appropriate for what you intend on doing:
https://www.google.com/#q=5V+to+3V+serial+input+step+down

Arduino mini 328 and Nokia 5110

Arduino Ide Serial Terminal

Littl' terminal in action displaying 9600 BAUD from GPS

A note about contrast..

One of the biggest PITA about the Nokia 5110 is that every one seems to have a different contrast requirements. This essentially is just a line in the code that sets a register in the Nokia controller.. but, unless you set this correctly, you may have no display to full dark display and it is ambient temperature sensitive.

So, I hacked a simple routine to allow you cycle through all of the possibilities and then when things look the best to you, pull the jumper and the value is written to EEPROM and used afterwards. If you plan on taking this out and about where temperatures will vary this becomes a requirement.

To calibrate your display, power the unit off, connect a jumper from Gnd to Arduino Pin D8 and power on the unit. Allow it to cycle once or twice for you to get an idea of what the best display value will provide. Then as the display cycles around again, just pull the wire on Pin D8 when the display looks the best. The value is written to EEPROM and the program restarts and uses that value.

You may wish to consider using this routine in all of your Nokia 5110 projects! You may also wish to connect a small push button switch (like Reset) so that you can use a small stylus and set this anytime you desire.

Ray

Code

Author

Ray Burnette

• 7 projects
• 466 followers

Additional contributors

• Nokia graphic functions by Jim Parks, Sylvain Bissonnette, KUK, others

Arduino Serial Port Terminal

Published on

January 26, 2014

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