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[on:]

Would be nice to touch a button in the terminal display to reset the Arduino. Opening and closing the serial window does this already due to the serial port open causing a reset via the DTR signal.

What I'm suggesting is that you have a button that will quickly close and reopen the serial port, thereby causing the same reset the boot load process does.

[Reply #1 on:]

Would be nice to touch a button in the terminal display to reset the Arduino. Opening and closing the serial window does this already due to the serial port open causing a reset via the DTR signal.

What I'm suggesting is that you have a button that will quickly close and reopen the serial port, thereby causing the same reset the boot load process does.

 That is another reason I often use a Windows terminal program called brey terminal. It has two features that really let it work well with the Arduino IDE without getting in the way, but providing more control then the IDE serial monitor. First brey terminal has a comm port connect/disconnect button, so the application can stay open on the desktop, but it can release the comm port so that I can just have the open Arduino IDE immediately do another upload if I wish. The Arduino IDE is well behaved in that when it completes a upload it automatically does a release of the comm port, so it's quite easy to utilize both programs without conflicts. Brey terminal also has buttons to activate the standard serial output control signals DTR and RTS, so I can force a board reset with a simple click of a button.

 The built in IDE serial monitor is a nice feature, but if you are doing serious comm troubleshooting there is a lot to be said for having a more powerful, and additional features that a full blown terminal programs brings to the table. The brey terminal is free and is a standalone EXE file requiring no installation. It's handy to just carry a copy around in your memory stick.

http://sites.google.com/site/terminalbpp/

Lefty

[Reply #2 on:]

All things considered, I'd rather see the IDE support a user-selectable external terminal emulator.  It shouldn't take much more than a signaling standard for shutting it down when a new sketch is uploaded.

[Reply #3 on:]

Lefty, that terminal program is great. Does it do ANSI emulation too? I will try it but maybe you know...  Once neat thing that I tried was cycling the RTS to cause a reset without having to close and reopen the port. I wonder if a macro button could be set to do that...

One idea is that the IDE could create a virtual serial port and open and close it as needed for the load process. Then you could connect any terminal application to the virtual port and give the IDE plenty of control to make it work well.

[Reply #4 on:]

All things considered, I'd rather see the IDE support a user-selectable external terminal emulator.  It shouldn't take much more than a signaling standard for shutting it down when a new sketch is uploaded.

I'm with you.