Serial Monitor

Serial Monitor provides a comprehensive solution for all your serial communication needs. By offering features like detailed logging, flexible data views, and advanced analysis tools, Serial Monitor ensures you have complete control and understanding of your serial data. It simplifies troubleshooting, accelerates debugging, and empowers users to tackle even the most complex serial challenges.

Capabilities

Required

Required for monitoring app-to-kernel interactions. Enables the Serial Monitor, which can be used to sniff applications on the user’s PC talking to serial devices.

Optional

Required for establishing serial connections over SSH.
Enables the regex-based markup of serial binary data in the log.

Basic Setup

  1. Ensure Tibbo Device Monitor is installed

Serial Monitor uses the Device Monitor service, consisting of a kernel-mode module intercepting requests from applications to the specified devices and a user-mode configuration utility.

Installation and proper configuration of the Device Monitor service are sometimes stumbling points for users. Please follow these knowledge base articles for more information:

  1. In IO Ninja, click the “New Session” dropdown and select a new “Serial Monitor” session
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  1. If not selected automatically, select your serial device from the “Port:” dropdown
_images/serial-mon-port.png
  1. Click the “Capture” button on the far right of the filter bar.
_images/serial-mon-capture.png

If you encounter an “Access is denied” error, please refer to our knowledge base.

  1. View the serial communication in the Serial Monitor window.
_images/serial-mon-analyze.png
  1. Adjust settings as needed via the “Settings” button (see “Settings” section below for details)

Settings

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Setting Description Default
Port Specify a serial port to monitor. You can either (a) pick a port from the combo box (which should contain all serial ports detected on your machine) or (b) type the device name directly.  
Read parallelism
(Windows-only)
Maximum number of read requests to submit to tdevmon at the same time. Having more than one pending read at a time helps prevent notification loss in IO-intensive scenarios (after filling one user buffer, tdevmon can immediately switch to the next one without any waiting). Increasing this number beyond 4 usually won’t yield any extra gains. 4
Read block size (B) The size of each individual read block submitted to tdevmon. 4KB
RX buffer size (B) The full size of the incoming data (RX) buffer. Affects read throughput. 16KB
RX buffer full notifications Toggle warnings in log about the incoming data (RX) buffer getting full. off
Pending notification limit The size of the tdevmon kernel buffer. Exceeding notifications will be dropped. Important note – setting this value too high will waste the precious kernel memory. Only increase it when necessary, e.g., to combat data loss. 1MB
Serial setting changes Toggle notifications about serial setting (baud rate, data size, parity, stop bits, flow control) changes in the log. on
DTR/RTS changes Toggle notifications about control line (DTR, RTS) changes in the log. on
DSR/CTS/DCD/RI changes Toggle notifications about status line (DSR, CTS, DCD, RI) changes in the log. on
Serial line errors Toggle warning about serial line errors (PARITY, FRAMING and BREAK) in the log. on