March 31, 2014

Build an external serial monitor for your Arduino

Another entry in the Freetronics Instructables competition this week is an external serial monitor display module by Instructables member ARPix. It is an ingenious solution to the problem of needing to monitor the output from the Arduino's serial output but not wanting to use a whole computer to do the job.

The device uses its own microcontroller with Arduino firmware to receive and display the data, and has a simple menu system to select display format and also the baud rate for the serial connection. Although the designer has used a particular type of display as shown below, you can easily modify the sketch to use almost any display type.

Overall a fascinating project and worthwhile entry to the competition, so check out the Instructable for complete details. And for more, we're on facebookGoogle+, and twitter - so follow us for news and product updates as well.

Need an external display for your Arduino or Raspberry Pi projects? Check out our 128x128 pixel OLED Module. With a diagonal size of 1.5" and 16,384 colours to select from, so almost anything is possible. Furthermore there's a microSD card socket, and removable tabs on each side which can hold LEDs and buttons:

And using the module is made simple - we have tutorials, drivers for both the Arduino and Raspberry Pi platforms - and adaptor shields for ArduinoLeoStick and Raspberry Pi - great for experimenters or those who use both systems. Furthermore, check out the forum where members are already creating modified drivers to rapidly increase the display speed. For more information including our Quickstart guides - and of course to order - visit the OLED Module product page

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