

It is one of the feature rich terminal available so far. At Etiq, we are using RealTerm for our serial debugging purposes. There are also some other tools available including,Īnd the list is a never-ending one. One of the most familiar terminal programs is Hyperterminal which was earlier provided with Microsoft Windows. Present terminal software is emulating the same experience. The name ‘terminal’ comes from earlier computer terminal which was used for entering and retrieving data. It can be used for monitoring, controlling and viewing serial data. An example for serial terminal programs is RealTerm. They are useful for sending and receiving data sent by serial communication protocols, most notably RS-232 or UART. To be a little more precise, serial terminals are software tools used for development purposes, debugging and reverse engineering. It simply appears as a serial stream that you can communicate with exactly as you would with any other serial device.We need monitoring software for capturing and debugging data streams in serial communication, they are called serial terminals. I’ve used this method to connect to the sparkfun Bluetooth Mate Gold. Once you’ve connected to the serial bluetooth device with screen, the connection will be held active for the length of your session. Then you will be able to see the device in the list of devices. You must simply make sure that the bluetooth device is paired and active. This method works equally well if you want to connect to a serial bluetooth device. Press “y” and you’ll be back to your shell terminal. Screen will then prompt you to quit and kill all of your windows. To exit (and close the screen gracefully) press: control-a Once you’ve connected, you can use the terminal as you normally would. Remember to specify the speed (baud rate) after the device name. Once you’ve determined which device you would like to use, you can execute the SCREEN command to start the serial terminal session on your Mac. The first thing to do is determine which device you want to connect to.

This works well particularly if you have an RS-232 serial to USB converter. There are a few software apps out there, but I find it much simpler to simply use the terminal application “screen”.

If you develop on an Apple and find yourself doing any sort of device or embedded development, you will quickly find the need for a serial terminal on Mac.
