Serial Tool GFX

Use LVGL to create a graphical UI for displaying serial data. Based on the serial_tool repo which was to create a simple USB-to-Serial program in C to allow sending and receiving whatever protocol/data you want over serial. Run on Linux, Windows, or Mac.

Testing has been done on an Ubuntu VM running in Parallels on a Macbook with Apple silicon, a Windows machine running Windows 11, and an x86 Ubuntu machine.

In order to connect to the serial device on Linux, you'll need to run as root (sudo), or put the user in the dialout group as follows:

sudo usermod -a -G dialout user 

user is whatever user is currently logged in that you want to run the program with. Log out and back in again for the command to take...

Connection example:

user@some-machine:~/serial_tool$ ./build/serial_tool -s /dev/ttyUSB0

port_name: /dev/ttyUSB0
path: /dev/ttyUSB0 returned 3
port /dev/ttyUSB0 opened successfully

If running on Windows, the command might look something like this:

PS C:\Users\user\Documents\_code\serial_tool\build> .\serial_tool.exe -s COM5

port_name: COM5
port COM5 opened successfully

Searching for serial devices.

On Linux and MacOS, the serial devices can be found in the /dev directory.

ls /dev

On Windows, from the command line you can use the following command:

mode | findstr "COM"

This should return something like

Status for device COM6:
Status for device COM5:

where COM5 and COM6 are serial devices connected to the computer. Instead of /dev/ttyUSB0 for the path on Linux, you would use COM5 or COM6 on Windows.

Build the project

This project is built with gcc. On Windows, you can install MinGW.

The build system is CMake.

On Windows,

• Download and run Windows x64 Installer
• Add CMake to the PATH variable
• As of this documentation, the CMake version is 3.29.3

On MacOS, CMake can be installed using brew. On Linux,

sudo apt install cmake

On a Linux system, the bare minimum is required to build the project

    sudo apt update
    sudo apt install build-essential
    sudo apt install git
    sudo apt install cmake
    sudo apt install gdb

Run CMake and Build

From the project directory .../serial_tool/ create a build directory and change into it.

mkdir build
cd build

Then run CMake followed by make to build

cmake ..
make

Unit Testing

Mac / Linux

• Install ceedling

  sudo gem install ceedling
  

• Reference file project.yml and add your source files here.
• Unit tests are added to the tests directory
• Naming should be test_<your_module_to_test>.c
• Run tests by running

  ceedling test:all
  

• "Clean" ceedling files by running

  ceedling clobber
  

Windows

• Don't fuss with it. Just unit test on a Linux VM or Mac.