sterm 6.0.0a5

A minimal serial / UART terminal that focus on being easy to use.

sterm

sterm is a minimal serial terminal that focus on being easy to use and not sucking. - This client simply works. It has inline input and supports Unicode (utf-8). It writes whatever it receives to stdout so that also ANSI escape sequences work as expected.

Ideal for debugging: With the --binary option, the received data will be output byte wise as hexadecimal numbers.

Ideal for a remote Linux shell: With the --unbuffered option, each character typed gets directly send to the connected device without buffering and echoing.

Project State: Alive and maintained

Installation

You should check the install.sh script before executing. The default installation path is /usr/local/bin

# Download
git clone https://github.com/rstemmer/sterm.git
cd sterm

# Install
sudo ./install.sh

# Dependencies
pip3 install pyserial

Usage

Command Line Arguments

sterm [-h] [--unbuffered] [--escape character] [--binary] [-b BAUDRATE] [-f FORMAT] [-w logfile] DEVICE

• -h: Print help.
• -u: Enable unbuffered mode
• --escape: Define an alternative escape character. Default is escape ("\e").
• --binary: Print hexadecimal values instead of Unicode characters. (Only applied on output, input will still be UTF-8)
• -b: Baudrate. Default: 115200 baud.
• -f: Configuration-triple: xyz with x = bytelength in bits {5,6,7,8}; y = parity {N,E,O}; z = stopbits {1,2}. Default: "8N1" - 8 data bits, no parity bits and 1 stop bit.
• -w: Write received data into a file.

DEVICE is the path to the serial terminal. For example /dev/ttyS0, /dev/ttyUSB0, /dev/ttyUART0, /dev/ttyACM0, /dev/pts/42.

For details read the man-page.

Internal commands

The following strings get not send to the device. Instead they are interpreted by sterm. They have a preceded escape character defined with --escape. Default is the escape key ("\e").

• exit: quit sterm
• version: print version

Examples

Send ping to UART0 and exit:

sterm /dev/ttyUART0
ping
pong
^[exit

Send hello to a serial device with 9600 baud, 7 data bits, even parity, and 2 stop bits. Then exit:

sterm -b 9600 -f 7E2 /dev/ttyS0
hello
world
^[exit

Connecting to a Linux device

sterm --unbuffered --escape _ /dev/ttyUSB0
~# whoami
root
~# _exit

Communicating with two sterm instances via a pseudo terminal for testing: