Really like the new IDE but have a couple of problems with the serial monitor.
If I copy and paste the text from the serial monitor into Excel it does not recognize the carriage returns. It did in the old version. Workaround is to paste into Notepad first and then transfer to Excel.
How do I stop data coming into the serial monitor from a running program? In the old version I just unplugged the USB cable and the text remained on the screen so I could view it or cut and paste to Excel. In the new version all the text disappears from the screen when I unplug!
Hi @Ian_from_New_Zealand. I agree the situation with trying to transfer data from the Arduino IDE 2.x's Serial Monitor is not good at all currently. I just tried it out to see what was going on with this carriage return situation and I actually couldn't even manage to copy anything at all from it! So you're actually ahead of me.
There is a proposal from Arduino's lead developer for the IDE 2.x here:
It sounds like this will fix the problems with copying data.
I'm not sure this might be a really stupid question...
I can't find the "send" button in the serial monitor. Am I not supposed to be able to send data too? The incomming data is fine; also I am able to upload my sketch, so there's no problem with readonly to the serial device. But typing something and then press [enter] doesn't do anything. It's not sending it, it's not even clearing out the input-text field. Am I missing something here?
Maybe I should notice that there is an orange warning sign next to my board&port setting. I can't find the meaning of the warning anywhere.
Running version 2.0.0-beta3
Date: 2021-02-26
CLI Version 0.16.1
On a Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS machine (64bit)
Hi @geertvw. I hope its not stupid because I had the same confusion. Unfortunately, the way to send data via Serial Monitor in Arduino IDE 2.x is currently somewhat unintuitive. There is no "Send" button, and instead of being able to press the "Enter" key to send, you must press "Ctrl + Enter" ("Cmd + Enter" for macOS users).
There is some gray text in the input field that mentions this, but it disappears as soon as you start typing into it, so it's easy to miss. I did submit a request to the Arduino developers for this experience to be improved.
geertvw:
Maybe I should notice that there is an orange warning sign next to my board&port setting. I can't find the meaning of the warning anywhere.
This indicates that Arduino IDE 2.x was not able to automatically identify the port of the board. The ports of boards that have a dedicated USB VID/PID pair can be be automatically detected. But some boards use a general purpose USB chip with a manufacturer supplied VID/PID (e.g., FTDI FT232R, WCH CH340) and there is no way for the board associated with these ports to be identified.
You're welcome. I'm glad if I was able to be of assistance.
There is currently a discussion in progress about this warning symbol you mentioned and how the user experience can be improved when usiing boards that can't be auto-detected:
There's a huge problem with the serial monitor, (compared with 1.8.13) : it's far too slow! I couldn't understand why the output seemed to bear no resemblance to what what happening in my hardware. Then I realised that . even after resetting the arduino, the serial output keeps printing for several minutes, from a cache of some sort!
I switched back to 1.18.3 and everything is fine. My loop tales less than 2 minutes with that, and nearly 30 minutes with version 2! (serial at 57600 baud).
Probably not noticeable if you have lots of delay() statements in your code but it makes the output worse tahn useless if you want to run somethng at full speed.
For now, I would recommend you to adjust your code to increase the interval between prints to a sensible level. For most applications, you'll actually find that this is a useful improvement because it's likely that before you were just getting a blur of unreadable output.
OK, good that it's known, but I couldn't find any reference to it here on the forum. New users of Arduino won't neccessarily know about GitHub.
Ironically, I saw some odd effects with only a small number of print statements. Not knowing of this bug, I added more print statements to see what was going wrong........
For now, I have switched back to the older version.
quilkin:
OK, good that it's known, but I couldn't find any reference to it here on the forum. New users of Arduino won't neccessarily know about GitHub.
That's perfectly fine. The forum is the best place for people to have discussion and request help. We can be more "chit chatty" here than would be appropriate for GitHub, where there must be a tight focus on the software development work to allow the developers to be productive.
I always try to link to the relevant GitHub resources during discussions here on the forum so that the participants can know that it has been reported to the developers and have access to any useful information that might be available on GitHub. Conversely, when things come up here that have not yet been reported to the developers, I often suggest opening an issue on GitHub, and will sometimes do that myself if the OP is unable.
So even if there is some redundancy between the two worlds, I think they are able to work symbiotically for the most part with a little help from some "bridges" who dabble in both worlds, such as myself.
quilkin:
For now, I have switched back to the older version.
I'm sorry to hear that the IDE 2.x was not able to meet your requirements in its current beta development state.
I think this issue is a bit tricky due to the modular architecture of the new IDE. Unlike the classic Arduino IDE, the IDE 2.x code base is exclusively concerned with the GUI, and even that modularized by using the Eclipse Theia IDE framework for the universal elements, with an extension to provide the Arduino-specific customizations. All the non-GUI tasks are handled by separate tools. In the case of the Serial Monitor, this is done by Arduino CLI. There are some huge benefits to this approach vs. the original monolothic (translation: nightmare to maintain) approach used in the classic IDE's Java code base, but it seems it does introduce more potential for bottlenecks in the transfer of data between the components.
Fortunately, Arduino has some very talented people working on this problem, so I'm confident we will see some improvements on the situation in upcoming releases. And of course it's open source software so the entire Arduino community has the opportunity to lend a hand to improve this tool.
