Serial Monitor Questions

General
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  1. Can and if so how can the Particle CLI Monitor be used to have flow control to the serial stream?

  2. Particle Document claims one can use the Arduino IDE app serial monitor to monitor Particle particles. How is this setup?

Background:
Got my first Argon a couple of days ago. Been playing with ESP8266 for a few months and Arduino for a few months prior to that. Mesh capabilities attracted me to the Particle platform. I’m making some progress. Have (so far) only used Particle Web IDE. (Not Workbench.) Was expecting/assuming/hoping/wishing there was a built in monitor capability similar to the Arduino Web IDE. (If there is I couldn’t find it.) Eventually ran into the Particle CLI and got that installed and running on my Windows 10 machine. Got the CLI serial monitor capability monitoring my Argon application but I couldn’t figure out anyway to pause or flow control the serial output. The Arduino, of course, has a checkbox for autoscroll which comes in real handy for debugging allowing to look back at what’s been printed. I found in the Particle Docs that the Arduino Serial Monitor will work. https://docs.particle.io/support/particle-devices-faq/serial-faq/#arduino-ide

However I couldn’t get it to work. It would (apparently) attach to the serial port but wouldn’t print anything. In fact at times it would attach so solidly I couldn’t kill the Ardunio app without either unplugging the Argon from the USB port or using Task Manager to kill the Arduino App (which killed the monitor window.)

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Hi @wakewatcher - interesting! I have no problem using the Arduino IDE serial monitor with my Particle devices (though at this point I prefer particle serial monitor --follow in CLI).

Can you tell me a bit about how your code manages its Serial connection? Some pseudo (or just minimal) code would be great!

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I had a similar issue a while back and the root cause was the flow control settings dictated by the selected targed platform in Arduino IDE (e.g. ESP8266).
When I changed the target to Genuine Arudino the HW flow control settings of the monitor were changed in a way to allow it to receive Particle sent data.

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Thanks to both of you. @ScruffR that worked! (Not sure why but just as long as it works I’m good.)

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FWIW I almost always use TeraTerm for USB/serial communications with Particle devices. It’s Windows-only though. https://ttssh2.osdn.jp/index.html.en Like CLI’s monitor (with the correct flag set), its connection is persistent through device resets, but it has bidirectional comms (CLI’s is receive only). TeraTerm boots quite a bit faster than the Arduino IDE too, at least for me.

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