Overview

This app lets you connect to as many serial devices are plugged into your machine, each in their own little panel. This is useful for me since I often have lots of gadgets I'm building plugged into a hub, and opening tons of pyserial-term or Putty windows is a pain in the ass. Instead we get this now:

Features:

• Autodetects new devices via the usb package (the Rescan button isn't really necessary but the Menu looked too empty).
• Unplugged devices appear as "dropped", and reconnect to the same window when replugged.
• Hide unused serial ports with visibility
• Change color and rename each window; resize the window
• Send ASCII with no line ending, LF, or CRLF; or send RAW hex octets

Background

I wrote a pretty complex Electron GUI for my last job at EEMBC in 2018. I used a bunch of frameworks, scaffolding, pacakges, and tools that have been updated so many times that the original doesn't even compile anymore. Curse of JavaScript frameworks. So I started again with the latest tools (almost 5 years later!). Tools I like to use are:

• Electron
• Vite (hotloading open serial ports is a bad idea) (Note to self: try using onUnmount() to close the ports during hotloading?)
• Vue
• TypeScript
• Pug
• Bootstrap and Fontawesome
• Serialport (reconbot is awesome)

Project Setup

Install

$ npm install

Development

$ npm run dev

Build

# For windows
$ npm run build:win

# For macOS
$ npm run build:mac

# For Linux
$ npm run build:linux

TODO

Still working out packaging stuff, like icons, what I want on the macOS menu, help, etc. Would also like to be able to reorder windows and change font sizes.