Graphical User Interface for Serial Communication

SerialUI provides a graphical interface to send and receive text from the serial port, including a serial plotter for displaying numerical data. It offers features beyond the Arduino IDE Serial Plotter.

BLESerialUI is equivalent to SerialUI but uses the Nordic Serial UART on a BLE connection (Experimental, Unfinished Code)

The programs are written in python using pyQt.

Description

How to Use This Program

• Usage instructions.
• Supplemental instructions.
• Helpful reading for QT and qtgraph.

Installation Requirements

One liner Windows: - pip3 install pyqt5 pyqtgraph numpy pyserial markdown wmi bleak qasync

One liner Linux: - pip3 install pyqt5 pyqtgraph numpy pyserial markdown pyudev bleak qasync

• pyqt5 or pyqt6 user interface
• pyqtgraph display
• numpy data gathering and manipulation
• pyserial serial interface
• markdown help file
• wmi on Windows for USB device notifications
• pyudev on Linux for USB device notifications
• qasync and bleak for bluetooth communication

In future version we will also need:

• scipy image decompression
• numba acceleration of numpy code
• cobs serial data encoding (byte stuffing)
• zlib and tamp for compression

Installation of PyQt5/6 has its own dependencies. If it fails, read the suggested solution in the error messages. For example pyOpenGL might be required.

The main programs are SerialUI.py and BLESerialUI.py. The use files in the assets and helper folders.

Data Parsing

• Data Parsing

Indicating Data

• Feature not implemented yet.

Arduino Test Programs

In the Arduino_programs folder are example programs that simulate data for display.

Efficiency

Comparing SerialUI to other serial IO programs:

Text Display

Teensy 4.0 using the Test Program from Paul Stoffregen with default settings produces about 530k lines/second and 19Mbytes/second on the USB port:

• SerialUI: ~500k lines/sec at ~17 MBytes/sec
• Arduino IDE (2.3.5): 530k lines/sec
• Putty: 483k lines/sec
• cat /dev/ttyACM0 | pv -r > /dev/null 14-18 MB/s
• screen /dev/ttyACM0 4000000 160k lines/sec

Arduino IDE is slightly faster in raw text display.

Limit in SerialUI is the Qt plain text display widget. It can display about 70k lines/sec. SerialUI displays the most recent text in the display window. It saves all data to file at the reported throughput.

ESP32-S3 Adafruit Feather:

• Arduino IDE: 17k lines/sec
• Serial UI: 17k lines/sec and 560 kBytes/sec

There is no difference between SerialUI and ArduinoIDE.

Charting

With simple simulated data from Teensy 4.0 we can retrieve and plot 2 channels with about 80k samples/second/channel.

Arduino IDE plotter does not provide performance metrics.

Author

Urs Utzinger, 2022-2025 (University of Arizona)

Contributors

Cameron K Brooks, 2024 (Western University)