Serial communications

tio

Serial ports used to be the standard way for computers to communicate with peripherals, whether they were printers, modems, or other computers. This was because a serial connection was easy to implement, both from a hardware and from a software perspective. There was one pin for sending data, another pin for receiving data, and a few more pins to help detect a connection and to manage the transmission. Software would send a burst of data and then wait to see if it was acknowledged. All a user had to do was make sure both ends of the connection were using the same transmission rate and error correction values. It was then a simple matter of sending, receiving, and interpreting the data. All of this could be done with a simple serial terminal application, and these used to be incredibly common. Even the Linux terminals we use every day are descended from serial communication devices, although with the exception of the venerable screen, many have lost their ability to talk to a serial port directly.

The lack of a modern serial terminal utility wouldn't be a problem if serial communication were no longer a thing, but there are still many devices that do connect to our computers via a simulated serial port over USB, including many Arduino and embedded devices. If you need to talk to these devices directly, you still need to use a serial terminal. As mentioned, screen still works, and Minicom is another good option, but neither are especially adaptive. You augment them with your own scripts, but they otherwise behave very much like a BBS terminal. This is where tio can help. Tio is a modern tool to help with simple serial input and output. Like Minicom, it can be used for interactive sessions, but it's far more adaptable and often works without the prerequisite trial and error. It defaults to a sensible configuration and can guess device names, show statistics, log to a file, pipe data capture or data transmission, redirect to a socket, and access a port at the same time as Minicom. If you ever find yourself in need of talking to something across a serial port, tio should be first on your list of resources.

Project Website

https://github.com/tio/tio

Tio can talk to your serial devices and can be used to capture and send data in ways other purpose-built tools cannot.

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