For a long time now I have been working with Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). One of my interest in this field has been improving the speed and the reliability of the serial communication among sensor nodes.

One problem I have always had to solve in one way or another when coming up with a new idea was testing it! Unfortunately, even when there are many serial terminals out there (cutecom, minicom, etc.), I found it very difficult to cover all my needs. For this reason, I decided to make my own serial terminal, keeping in mind that it had to be as configurable as possible, as well as easy scriptable. The product, serialSend.

SerialSend is a simple piece of code that reproduces many of the functionality found in cutecom (it has always been my favourite), allowing at the same time to access its functionality by command line. This facilitates incorporating a device that uses the UART to any existing piece of code. In fact, the only requirement before using serialSend is configuring the main script (serialSend.sh), which looks like this:

After that it is enough to pass a file or a string as an argument and serialSend will redirect it through the UART to the selected device.

I hope there are more people that find serialSend as useful as I do 🙂

–javier