Education Project: How to display Arduino serial output on large LCD display connected to Win computer?

Projects General Guidance
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Hi Everyone,
I have been teaching Arduino Stuff for years now.

I am developing a course for use with total newbies. I am working with a school I started in Egypt the past 2 years (Link). and a couple USA schools and soon I'll move to South Korea for 2 years.

A link HERE to the seriously-unfinished Wiki pages.

Hope someone is doing this and can contribute to this. I need the teacher to be showing Arduino programming on the LCD to students, and then show the Arduino output (Ideally in another onscreen window).

We may have another Arduino running like THIS which also has serial output. Good for teaching Voltage Dividers etc.

Any suggestions or pointers greatly appreciated!

Regards, Terry King
...In The Woods In Vermont
The one who dies with the most Parts LOSES! WHAT DO YOU NEED??

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Abou Ben Adhem

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If the PC can display an application window on the LCD screen then all you need to do is to run a terminal emulator such as PuTTY in that window in order to display the Serial output from the Arduino

That sounds so simple that I suspect that there is more to your requirements than meets the eye

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Larry, Thanks for that inspiration again! My wife will be head librarian at a very high end private school on Jeju Island. I'll be looking for the kids whose school doesn't do much with technology somewhere around Seogwipo. There are also refugees from Yemen. I was once almost in Yemen, on The Farasan Islands just above it on the Red Sea. No missiles going by back then. It IS a big and weird World. Regards, Terry

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Hi Bob, I will play with PuTTY. Haven;t used it much since my Model33 days.
Ideally I want something easy for teachers to use that displays only the serial output in a window. Maybe with control of font size. I can make something work for me but I want to support teachers..

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Hi Bob, I found COOLTERM that will let me use large dark fonts. Like this:

CoolTerm1
CoolTerm11051×707 162 KB

It also has graphing capability which I will check out.

Easy Download is Here:

The output from Arduino shown is from a classroom example written using the SCRATCH derivative called KIDSBLOCK . Looks like this:

KIDSBLOCK_SERIAL
KIDSBLOCK_SERIAL1950×867 354 KB

I guess I'll recommend teachers use the TeachableMoment to talk a little about Serial Data, TTL, USB and All That.

Thanks!

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I just found

but have not yet see if it lives up to its claims.

a7

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I have used CoolTerm too. It is more intuitive to use than PuTTY but sometimes there can be too many options

Either way, the principle of using a terminal emulator to display the serial output is what is important

If you were using IDE 1.x then you could simply put the Serial monitor on the LCD screen as its window can be moved independently of the the IDE. You can do almost the same with IDE 2.x by opening two instances of the IDE associated with the same Serial port. This has the advantage over a terminal emulator that you do not need to disconnect the second instance when uploading code to the board as the IDE will take care of it fo you