How to save data, appearing in Arduino serial monitor, to a physical file on MAC

Projects Interfacing w/ Software on the Computer
1

Hi,
I am relatively new to Arduino programming and I have a question about saving data, appearing in the Arduino serial monitor, to a file on my MAC hard disk. I have made some programming, where the output is presented on the monitor. I would, however, like the data to be saved to a file, in some cases to be analysed in e.g. Excel.
If you can help me with advice, please know that I am not familiar with expressions like "/dev/tty........", so some advice would be needed about such details, as well. :slight_smile:
Being "relatively new" to Arduino programming may be an understatement, but there are some obstacles which I need to overcome, in order to advance in this respect.
Best regards,
Kenneth Lundkvist
Uppsala, Sweden

2

If you're happy to start an application and let it run as you would use serial monitor:

There are terminal programs that can save received data to file; not familiar with Mac from that perspective. There might already be something installed, else it looks like minicom is available for Mac and that can do the trick.

If it needs to run 24/7 it will be trickier; I would happily write an application for it (if I was a Mac user) but there might be other ways to do it.

3

It seems, that "processing" does the trick.
Look at this thread.

If you want to download processing for Mac:
Voilà!

4

kennethlundkvist:
Hi,
I am relatively new to Arduino programming and I have a question about saving data, appearing in the Arduino serial monitor, to a file on my MAC hard disk. I have made some programming, where the output is presented on the monitor.

You just send the data to a proper terminal programme instead of the serial monitor. It is as simple as that. No change to programme required.

5
  • After your sketch runs, click anywhere in the Serial Monitor text.
  • Press Command-A to select all of the text.
  • Press Command-C to copy all of the text to the clipboard.
  • Open application TextEdit. It will pop up a file dialog.
  • Click on the "New Document" button at the bottom of the dialog to create Untitled.txt.
  • Press Command-V to paste the clipboard into the blank document.
  • Select File->Save... to save the document with the name and location of your choice.
1 Like
6

There are serial terminal programmes for Mac that can save the serial data to a file (for example): CoolTerm