Looking at serial port traffic

Question

I'm a Windoze guy so I'm kinda lost here.

Usually when I want to see what's happening on a serial port IE com 1, I fire up PuTTY and point it at Com 1 and I'm done.

In Linux I don't have PuTTY.

More specifically I have an ARM board talking on a USB cable to /dev/ttyACM0 and I want to see what it is sending.

I've made a little program in Qt that reads the /dev/ttyACM0 and it is working to a certain degree but some data I'm getting looks wack so I want to confirm it.

When I plug the ARM board into the Win7 laptop it doesn't know what to do with it so I can't even use PuTTY.

How can I get PuTTY or equivalent application in Ubuntu ?

Answer 1

Easy game, in linux everything is a file! To check the board response use:

cat /dev/ttyACM0

to write data to serial use echo

sudo echo -e "YO" > /dev/ttyACM0

Answer 2

Read from serial port:

hexdump -v -e '/1 "%02X "' /dev/ttyUSB0

To add timeout to the process:

timeout 5 hexdump -v -e '/1 "%02X "'

I mentioned 5 means 5 seconds.

Write:

echo -e "\xFC\x00" > /dev/ttyUSB0