Serial Monitor

A cross-platform serial monitor and plotter written entirely in rust, the GUI is written using egui.
Inspired by the serial monitor/plotter from the Arduino IDE, but both plotting and reading the traffic can be done simultaneously.

Installation:

Download pre-built executables

Binary bundles are available for Linux, macOS and Windows.

Running the apple silicon binary (serial-monitor-aarch64-apple-darwin.app) may result to the message "Serial Monitor is damaged and cannot be opened.", to get around this you first need to run:
xattr -rd com.apple.quarantine Serial\ Monitor.app

On Linux first install the following:

sudo apt-get install libxcb-render0-dev libxcb-shape0-dev libxcb-xfixes0-dev libxkbcommon-dev libssl-dev

Compile from source

The source code can be run using cargo run or bundled to a platform-executable using cargo bundle.
Currently cargo bundle only supports linux and macOS bundles see github issue. As a work-around we can use cargo wix to create a windows installer.

Debian & Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install libxcb-render0-dev libxcb-shape0-dev libxcb-xfixes0-dev libxkbcommon-dev libssl-dev libudev-dev
cargo install cargo-bundle
cargo bundle

Fedora Rawhide

dnf install clang clang-devel clang-tools-extra libxkbcommon-devel pkg-config openssl-devel libxcb-devel gtk3-devel atk fontconfig-devel libusbx-devel

macOS

cargo install cargo-bundle
cargo bundle

iOS

But this is probably not useful since iOS devices do not let you access serial devices because of sandboxing.

sudo xcodebuild -license
rustup target add aarch64-apple-ios
cargo install cargo-bundle
./ios-cargo ipa --ipad --release

Windows

cargo install cargo-wix
cargo wix

Commandline Arguments

You can start the app with commandline arguments to automatically select a serial port and its settings:

Usage: serial-monitor-rust [OPTIONS]

Positional arguments:
  device                   Serial port device to open on startup

Optional arguments:
  -b, --baudrate BAUDRATE  Baudrate (default=9600)
  -d, --databits DATABITS  Data bits (5, 6, 7, default=8)
  -f, --flow FLOW          Flow conrol (hard, soft, default=none)
  -s, --stopbits STOPBITS  Stop bits (default=1, 2)
  -p, --parity PARITY      Parity (odd, even, default=none)
  -F, --file FILE          Load data from a file instead of a serial port
  --column COLUMN-LABELS   Column labels, can be specified multiple times for more columns
  --color COLUMN-COLORS    Column colors (hex color without #), can be specified multiple times for more columns
  -h, --help

Example usage:

serial-monitor-rust /dev/ttyACM0 --baudrate 115200

You can also preconfigure the column settings. The following example configures the name and color for two columns in the incoming data:

serial-monitor-rust --column Raw --color '808080' --column Temperature --color 'ff8000' /dev/ttyACM0

Features:

• Plotting and printing of data simultaneously
• Smart data parser, works with ", " or "," or ":" or ": "
• History of the past sent commands
• Low CPU Usage, lightweight
• Clear history options
• Data Window width (number of displayed datapoints in plot) is adjustable
• Cross-platform, fully written in Rust
• Ability to save text to file
• Ability to save the plot
• Allow to put in labels for the different data columns (instead of column 1, 2, ...)
• Allow to choose Data-bits, Flow-Control, Parity and Stop-Bits for Serial Connection
• Saves the configuration for the serial port after closing and reloads them automatically upon selection
• Option to save raw data to file
• Use keyboard shortcuts (ctrl-S to save data, ctrl-shift-S to save plot, ctrl-X to clear plot)
• Automatic reconnect after device has been unplugged
• Color-picker for curves
• Open a CSV file and display data in plot
• Allow to select (and copy) more than just the displayed raw traffic (also implement ctrl + A)
• Smarter data parser
• make serial print selectable and show corresponding datapoint in plot
• COM-Port names on Windows (display manufacturer, name, pid or vid of device?)
• current command entered is lost when navigating through the history
• command history is currently unlimited (needs an upper limit to prevent huge memory usage)
• data history is currently unlimited (needs an upper limit to prevent huge memory usage)
• ...

Tested on:

• macOS 12 Monterey x86
• macOS 13 Ventura x86
• macOS 13 Ventura ARM
• macOS 14 Sonoma ARM
• Debian 12 (Testing) x86
• Windows 10 x86
• ...

One might have to delete the Cargo.lock file before compiling.