cctalk Digest, Vol 84, Issue 5 - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

2 Aug 2010

Philip Pemberton <classiccmp at philpem.me.uk> wrote:

...
  Hi guys,

 I'm building some hardware that spits out debug info on a regular basis, 
 and I figured it'd be useful to have this data graphed on-screen. Making 
 it keep track of the last "N" samples and draw them wouldn't be hard, 
 except adding an LCD display is out of the question (takes up too many 
 I/O pins).

 On the other hand, I have a perfectly good serial port which runs at a 
 decent rate of speed (115200 baud), and Xterm can emulate a Tektronix 
 4014 vector terminal. Perfect... except I can't see an easy way to tie 
 Xterm to a serial port instead of having it run an application. 
xterm -e kermit

However, this also begs the question, what is plotting the the data, if 
you just output debug information? Some application I would assume...?
Why not have that application written on your linux system, and run it 
inside an xterm, and have the application read the data from the serial 
port, and then output the approriate stuff to control the window?

...
  There's nothing in the manpage (admittedly I
haven't read it all, just 
 grepped it for a few obvious terms) and 'apropos' isn't finding anything 
 useful. I've been told that tip(1) on BSD will do what I want, I just 
 can't find anything similar on Linux... 
tip probably don't exist on Linux, but all you need to know is that tip 
is a program to connect yourself out on a serial port. Any other program 
that do the same thing works equally well. And I have yet to see any 
program that works better for this kind of thing than kermit.

	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol