Serial Monitor on a Mobile Device

Firmware
1

Hi All,

Apologies if this question is elsewhere, I have searched but couldn’t find any answers in the forum.

As a part of debugging machines it would be very helpful if we could connect to the serial monitor of devices in the field. Our use case makes it difficult to use a laptop onsite. Has anyone successfully used the serial monitor to connect to a Boron with a mobile device or iPad?

If this is not possible does anyone have any ideas of what the best thing to use would be. I suppose I could use a raspberry pi and try and connect that to my mobile device for a screen.

Beyond this I guess its back to developing a mobile app to use a Bluetooth pseudo serial monitor

2

It is possible to use a phone or tablet to monitor the USB debug serial with caveats:

  • The device must be powered by something other than USB, such as VIN/VUSB, LiPo battery, etc.
  • The phone or tablet must support USB OTG (on-the-go)
  • You need a USB OTG adapter cable
  • It only works with Android phones and tablets; no Apple iOS devices support OTG
  • It may still not work with some devices; it’s pretty finicky

https://docs.particle.io/tutorials/learn-more/about-serial/#android-phone-or-tablet-with-usb-otg

Mapping the logging handler to BLE is also a reasonable option. You can use one of the off-the-shelf BLE UART mobile apps like the ones from Adafruit or Nordic to view the logs. This has the advantage of not needing to access the USB port and compatibility with iOS.

1 Like
3

Thanks Rick great advice. The android option seems like a good one for our use case in the short term.

5

This topic was automatically closed 182 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.