sterm 6.0.1

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

sterm

Status: Active - License: GPL v3

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sterm is a minimal serial terminal that focus on being easy to use. - This client just does its job.

📝 Table of Contents

• About
• Getting Started
• Usage
• Built Using
• Acknowledgments

🧐 About

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). Each character typed gets directly send to the connected device without buffering. It writes whatever it receives to stdout so that also Unicode and ANSI escape sequences work as expected.

Core Use-Cases

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 --noecho option, each character typed gets directly send to the connected device without buffering and echoing. This makes the Linux console usage seamlessly like using telnet or ssh.

Core Features

• Inline input
• No line buffering
• Unicode support
• ANSI Escape Sequences supported
• No GUI

🏁 Getting Started

There are two ways to install sterm. Directly using pip or from the cloned repository.

Installation using pip

pip install sterm

Installation from Repository

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

# Dependencies
pip install pyserial

# Install Package
pip install .

🎈 Usage

sterm has three interfaces:

1. Configuration files
2. The command line interface
3. Escape commands

Configuration via files

TODO - Not yet implemented.

Command Line Arguments

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

When a command line argument is contradictory to a setting in the configuration files, the command line argument has higher priority.

• -h: Print help.
• -n: Enable noecho mode. Default is echoing each entered key to stdout.
• --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.

Escape commands

The following strings can be entered while sterm is running. Just hit the escape-key and then enter the commands. They get not send to the device. Instead they are interpreted by sterm. The preceded escape character can be 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 --noecho --escape _ /dev/ttyUSB0
~# whoami
root
~# _exit

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

⛏️ Building and Testing

Testing

To test sterm from the sources, just call the test.py script. It runs the command line interface of sterm.

You can use socat to create a virtual serial connection with two endings, so that you can use two sterm processes to communicate with each other:

socat -d -d pty,raw,echo=0 pty,raw,echo=0

Building a new Package

To build a new package from the source code, just execute the pkg-make.sh script. Make sure to update the version number in the sterm/cli.py file. This version number, as well as the README.md file gets read by the setup.py file.

vim sterm/cli.py
./pkg-make.sh

🎉 Acknowledgements

• @kylelobo for this README template
• The pyserial project that is the base of sterm