Arduino Serial

Yes I knew that it could be resized, however I thought it required a manual action. If you were not to manually resize the window I thought it could work as a "smoke and mirrors" fix. But I do agree that a terminal supporting ANSI Escapes is what is needed.

Putty is a perfectly good example of a terminal and can respond to commands to change colour, move cursor etc etc, just look at the mirad of Raspberry PI scrips that make use of this

Here is an example of one from a friend of mine that installs a whole bunch of stuff and heavily leverages terminal emulation escape sequences to make a much friendlier screen

https://bitbucket.org/snippets/scargill/ekon6o/the-script

I am pretty sure that by default putty will emulate an  XTerm screen https://www.x.org/docs/xterm/ctlseqs.pdf

it certainly follows the ansi colour commands so for example, just put putty in  local echo and type "ESC"[0;92m and continue typing, The "ESC" is the actual escape key on the keyboard, the text will now be green

oir this simple mod to the ASCIITabletest.ino example will glean a colourful output

.......

void loop() {

  // prints value unaltered, i.e. the raw binary version of the

  // byte. The serial monitor interprets all bytes as

  // ASCII, so 33, the first number,  will show up as '!'

  Serial.print("\x1B[0;");

  Serial.print(thisByte);

  Serial.print("m");

  Serial.write(thisByte);

  Serial.print(", dec: ");

  // prints value as string as an ASCII-encoded decimal (base 10).

  // Decimal is the  default format for Serial.print() and Serial.println(),

  // so no modifier is needed:

  Serial.print(thisByte);

.......

Clearing the entire terminal seems the easiest way to achieve what requested. I can be done something like:

...
void loop()
{
  buttonState = digitalRead(buttonPin);


  if (buttonState != lastButtonState)
  {
    if (buttonState == HIGH) 
    {
      buttonPushCounter++;
      Serial.write('\f'); //clear screen
      Serial.println("on");
      Serial.print("number of button pushes: ");
      Serial.print(buttonPushCounter);
    } 
    // Delay a little bit to avoid bouncing
    delay(50);
  }
  // save the current state as the last state, for next time through the loop
  lastButtonState = buttonState;


  if (buttonPushCounter % 4 == 0) {
    digitalWrite(ledPin, HIGH);
  } else {
    digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW);
  }
  Serial.flush();
}

Fabio.

Pter, I think that the Arduino Serial Monitor can't be managed in this way as this is - as a matter of fact - a java multi line text window that canbe resized as you want.

What is needed is a terminal supporting ANSI Escapes, it is correct and in practice this means a terminal program (like the Linux term) that can be configured in VT100+ mode.

Enrico

Another "workaround" would be to figure out how many lines long the Arduino Serial Monitor is when you are using it and feed it that many line feeds effectively clearing the screen.

Could you use the ANSI escape codes to do this? Such as \u001b[2K to clear the line or \u001b[2J to clear the entire terminal screen. I know this isn't sending "backspaces" but its the same effect.

This is a possibility, although, if I understand right what you mean, there is the added complication that you need to count the number of digits you have just printed, in order to send the right number of backspaces, and avoid garbage digits left on the screen (i.e. if you print '9' you need only one backspace, but if you print "10" you need 2 backspaces, and so on).

I don't know much about this setup, but it should be possible to send or flush the serial buffer without sending a linefeed. Then it is a simple matter of sending a backspace before you send a new count.??

As RParkerE correctly pointed out, the Serial Monitor that comes with the Arduino IDE cannot handle the escape codes correctly. You need to use a terminal emulator. A common one is PuTTy, available on all platforms. One thing to take into account is that, as it stands, your code would still print on multiple lines, because of the println command, which automatically adds a LF. To stay on the same line, the print statements in your loop() function should be limited to the information that you want to print on the same line, something like:

Serial.print("number of button pushes: ");
Serial.print(buttonPushCounter);
Serial.write('\r');

Hope this helps.

Fabio.

You can try using Tera Term as your serial terminal if you are on Windows, or Minicom if on Linux, (or really any true serial terminal) which should support escape codes and allow you to overwrite that line