Tooling Tuesday: Tio

Connecting to a serial port is easy, and now it is even easier!

So what is it?

""tio" is a simple TTY terminal application which features a straightforward commandline interface to easily connect to TTY devices for basic input/output." - tio website.

Yeah but I use screen / byobu / dead badger for serial / tty comms.

This is an alternative which offers a great feature, if the device disconnects, for example when an Arduino board is flashed, tio will wait for the board to reappear and reconnect automatically!

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So how do I install it?

Ubuntu

sudo apt install tio

Snap

sudo apt install tio --classic

Fedora / Red Hat

dnf install tio

Mac

brew install tio

Thanks to John Kennedy for confirming this

So how do I use it?

Open a terminal and type tio to see all of the options available.

To connect to a device at /dev/ttyUSB0 with a baud rate of 115200 I type

tio /dev/ttyUSB0 -b 115200

How do I know which tty my USB device is communicating on?
In a terminal type the following command to list all the tty connections.

dmesg | grep tty

I saw [37363.824357] usb 1-1.4: cp210x converter now attached to ttyUSB0 and so I know that my device is at /dev/ttyUSB0

In this short GIF demo I connect to my RC2014 Micro Z80 board and type some BASIC commands. Then I pull the USB lead out of the board, wait a few seconds and then put it back in to show the board reconnecting. Handy!

So are you going to use it?

Yup. I typically use screen but I am going to add tio to my workflow and see how it works for me. So far, it has been really useful!

Happy Hacking