mcurses

"mcurses" is a minimized version of programming library ncurses which gives GUI like interfaces on text terminal.

The library mcurses was originally written by Frank M. for a number of microcontrollers.

This version runs directly on Arduinos.

The serial driver interfaces are replace by call-back-function so you can hook any In-Output to the library. This looks as follows:

setFunction_putchar(Arduino_putchar); // tell the library which output channel shall be used
setFunction_getchar(Arduino_getchar); // tell the library which input channel shall be used

Please take a look into the examples to see how it is to be done exactly.

What do you need to use this Library?

You need to install a terminal program on your computer to visualize the characters sent and received by the serial line of your computer. The Arduino IDE has a build in serial terminal but for this library the terminal has to emulate the VT220 standard. The Arduino terminal does not to this and therefore you need a separate terminal program.

On Windows you can uses for example

PuTTY
teraterm

There may be several others but these two I have tested.

On Linux you can use for example

minicom ( does not support VT220 but VT102 )

minicom -c on -b 115200 -D /dev/ttyACM0

The parameters have the following meaning

-c on : turn colors on

-b 115200: set baud rate to 115200

-D /dev/ttyACM0: the port to which the Arduino is connected

Hint: minicom can not display all graphics correctly because it supports only VT102 or ANSI and not VT220. Therefore it seems to have some problems with the colors. To solve this, change the terminal type manually to ‘ansi’. Also it seems to have some issues with the graphical symbols for lines and corners.

On Mac you can use for example

Qodem (available via Homebrew using brew install qodem)
picocom (again via Homebrew using brew install picocom)

Before running qodem, go to Terminal >> Preferences >> Keyboard and set "Use Option as Meta Key". You can then bring up menus and execute program commands via the Mac Option key.

Create a phonebook entry by pressing 'I'. It should look like this:

picocom should be called (2nd parameter) with the name of the serial device that your Arduino is connected to. Use ls /dev/tty.* to investigate.

Set type to CMDLINE. Set terminal emulation to VT220. Set Codepage to DEC.

VT220 emulation seems to work well. All of the demos looked fine. All other open source alternatives tried (except Putty for Mac...not tried) did not have VT220 emulation. SyncTERM, Zterm and screen were tried.

Hint: Once you are done with Qodem, use Option-X to quit. Option-Z will bring up a menu with other commands of interest.

Examples

When you load up an example, be aware that the default Serial port is used. If you intend to run the example against another serial port (for those Arduino that have another), search and replace Serial with Serialx with x=port number.

Hex Editor EEPROM Demo

Here is the "hexeditor_demo".

In this picture it is running on an ARDUINO UNO but you can easily include it on any microcontroller as follows:

#include "hexedit.h"

...
static uint16_t    memmoryStartAddress = 0x100;    // ATMEGA RAM start

hexedit (memmoryStartAddress);
...

For detailed information see the "hexeditor_demo" or "hexeditor_eeprom" Arduino sketch in the examples folder.

Temperature Demo

The "temperature_demo" displays bar graphs of a simulated disk storage in simulated real-time.

chuckb/mcurses