Serial monitor 'interruption'?

Projects Programming
1

Wasn't sure how to word this subject, as it's a bit of an obscure question.

To test a sketch I ran it overnight, from about 10 pm, so that I could study the serial print output this morning. It was still running, printing temperatures and RTC info to the monitor, with extracts to the 16x2 LCD, amongst other stuff.

At about 10 am I pulled the USB, copied the entire monitor content of about 27k lines to the clipboard, and pasted it to my text editor (TextPad). However, on studying that text file I was surprised to find that it was incomplete. Its last line was at 09:57, correct, but the first was 05:49. The intervening results all seem fine.

It seems implausible (impossible?) that the monitor could suddenly stop and restart, losing all previous content. My best bet is that the cause is therefore unrelated to the sketch or UNO, but somehow due to my editor failing to fully paste. I tried a simple test just now, printing about 32,000 lines, but they all got copied OK to TextPad.

I'll repeat the test tonight but meanwhile any ideas please?

2

You have it partially correct. The monitor does not save to a mass storage device so its buffer is completely internal to your computer using what RAM it was given. The writers of the IDE have probably set that size. That buffer limits the amount of data that can be saved for the display.

3

Adding a workaround for the above:

Use a 3rd party terminal program that can log to file.

4

Thanks both, appreciate the fast answers, understood.

Any consensus on the simplest alternative?

5

Post #3 ? Find one for your operating system and try it. If you don't like it, try another one.

For Windows: teraterm, coolterm, putty (probably) and a few others.