wtarreau/bootterm

The terminal written for its users by its users

bootterm's Issues

Feature request: Send a break to serial port on connection

I looked around, and was amazed by the fact that there doesn't seem to be a serial terminal which can send a BREAK to serial port on connection (only using escape command triggered by a user). Sending a BREAK on connection is the default behavior of the ser2net tool, and sought a way to emulate it. And I couldn't! As bootterm is a new tool, aspiring to improve on its predecessors, maybe it'll be interested to add it...

To elaborate why this may be useful - various devices may treat UART BREAK as analog of a "reset" signal. This is e.g. the case for CMSIS bootloader boards (many ARM boards, a random example is NXP FRDM-K64F board). So, if such a board is programmed with a simple "start, print something, stop" embedded application (common situation during initial stages of development and/or experimenting), the by sending BREAK on connection, you will cause the programmed app to re-run and get output. Whereas otherwise, you wouldn't see any output on connection, and would need to reach for a reset button, which is quite boring.

timestamp feature request.

First of all thanks for bootterm, your "Motivation" section resonates with me.

I do have a feature request though - ability to optionally (with a single-character command/config file) prepend every line in the terminal/output with a (configurable?) timestamp, ala "[yyy.mm.dd hh:mm:ss] ..." . It's very useful to have timing information when debugging various issues.

P.S.
minicom has this feature (Ctrl+A + N), but it has other issues, as you mentioned in "Motivation" section.
"tio" has it, but it's not configurable, shows only time without date.

Baud rate of 2,000,000

I have a microcontroller that wants to connect at 20000000 baud. I am using a SparkFun FTDI usb to UART 3.3 volt device. I can use the aging CoolTerm v1.7.0 build 825 to connect to this device via this USB/UART and see the output correctly. CoolTerm lets me select this 2000000 baud rate. When I try the same with bt 0.4.0 and the same USB device on Mac OS 12.6, it does not work and delivers the following:

dproffer@graymini hid_download_py % bt -b 2000000
No port specified, using cu.usbserial-A700eF7u (last registered). Use -l to list ports.
Trying port cu.usbserial-A700eF7u... Failed.
Failed to configure port: Invalid argument
Hint: maybe the baud rate is not supported by the port.
The following baud rates are known (not necessarily supported though):
           50       75      110      134      150
          200      300      600     1200     1800
         2400     4800     9600    19200    38400
        57600    76800   115200   230400
dproffer@graymini hid_download_py %

Thank you for your work on this project!

[Feature request] `Echo` function of input string?

In minicom, there's an echo on/off setting(Ctrl + A E), this is useful in some cases, like AT Command input.
I searched the echo keyword in this project, and the help output, it seems this function is missing.

Is this function already ready? Or would your add this function?

Thanks for this useful utils.

macOS support

(continuation of #2)

Regarding auto-detection, of course /sys/class/* will not work on macos. One discovery method per OS is needed. I have already identified the use of sysctl() for freebsd. Could you please issue sysctl -a|grep ^dev on macos to see if it shares anything with freebsd just in case ?

jakub@jakub-mbp :: 00:23:32 :: ~ 
$ sysctl -a|grep ^dev
jakub@jakub-mbp :: 00:23:39 :: ~ 
$

Sadly, no :(

macOS doesn't have "Serial" hardware type in System information. Only USB devices can be listed:

$ system_profiler SPUSBDataType
USB:

    USB 3.0 Bus:

      Host Controller Driver: AppleUSBXHCILPTH
      PCI Device ID: 0x8c31 
      PCI Revision ID: 0x0005 
      PCI Vendor ID: 0x8086 

(...)

        CP2102 USB to UART Bridge Controller:

          Product ID: 0xea60
          Vendor ID: 0x10c4  (Silicon Laboratories, Inc.)
          Version: 1.00
          Serial Number: 0001
          Speed: Up to 12 Mb/s
          Manufacturer: Silicon Labs
          Location ID: 0x14200000 / 6
          Current Available (mA): 500
          Current Required (mA): 100
          Extra Operating Current (mA): 0

but that still doesn't give us any direct info about Serial without doing VID/PID lookups.

Diff of /dev before and after connecting CP2102.

$ diff noserial.txt serial.txt 
268a269,270
> cu.SLAB_USBtoUART
> cu.usbserial-0001
462a465,466
> tty.SLAB_USBtoUART
> tty.usbserial-0001

(Weird that it is visible as two separate devices, maybe it's something related to my system setup/drivers)
[edit]
That was a driver issue - I had installed both Apple and Silabs kexts, uninstalling the later fixed the issue.

and here's for the FTDI

$ diff noserial.txt ftdi.txt 
268a269
> cu.usbserial-A9APTBNR
463a465
> tty.usbserial-A9APTBNR

Looks like the Arduino IDE went the easy way and just lists all ^cu\. devices.

Can't find USB CDC serial ports

Bootterm can't seem to find a connected USB CDC serial device.

$ ls /dev/ttyACM0 
/dev/ttyACM0
 
$ bt -l
 port |  age (sec) | device     | driver           | description          
------+------------+------------+------------------+----------------------
    0 |          0 | ttyS0      | serial           |                  
 *  1 |          0 | ttyS1      | serial           |                  

$ sudo bt -l
[sudo] password for mike: 
 port |  age (sec) | device     | driver           | description          
------+------------+------------+------------------+----------------------
    0 |          8 | ttyS0      | serial           |                  
 *  1 |          8 | ttyS1      | serial           |                  

[Feature request] RS485 support

RS485 requires some special flag in the ioctl settings. Can we support it as the new version of minicom(RTS delay...) ?

Please add support for \r\n

Some devices (a marvin 3D printer here) send both \r\n as a EOL. Could you please add a flag to treat this like a simple \n in terminal. (\r\n is normal in capture file).

Rename to /usr/bin/bootterm?

I find /usr/bin/bt to be a bit... generic? If I installed it a while back, and looked in my /usr/bin, I'd probably wouldn't remember what it. Conversely, if I wanted to connect to my new ESP32 board after not having done so in a while, I'd probably remember this "bootterm" utility, and I'd probably try to type "bootterm", rather than "bt".

(And this may be me, but when I see "bt", I can't stop but think "Bluetooth" for a second.)

With a quick search, I couldn't find of another package shipping in {/bin,/sbin,/usr/bin,/usr/sbin}/bt, but it seems a bit risky, in the context of a larger namespace, like ones that distributions maintain. (I'm looking into packaging BootTerm for/in Debian, which enforces uniqueness in $PATH; no other package will be able to use "bt" if BootTerm does.)

Any reason to not use /usr/bin/bootterm instead? Users can always add alias bt=booterm in their preferred shell if they use this often and want to save a few characters.

Cannot use relative paths (as symlinks to devices)

I have created symlinks into /dev/serial/by-id/ to help working with several usb/serial adapters. I cannot refer to them using a relative path:

$ strace -efile bt ./ttyA35 
...
openat(AT_FDCWD, "/dev/./ttyA35", O_RDWR|O_NOCTTY|O_NONBLOCK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
Trying port ./ttyA35... Failed! (No such file or directory)
Failed to open port: No such file or directory
+++ exited with 2 +++

A workaround is to use bt $PWD/ttyA35 but it's pretty ugly :)

Probably the argument should be considered a usual relative pass when it contains a / ?

Is it really that much of a gain to spare the user from typing /dev/ when he likely has to enter tty anyway ? I'd think a string without a / would make more sense to use as bt USB0, but I guess it can be a matter of taste...