MegunoLink supports serial connections with your Arduino at baud rates from 300 to 500,000 baud. Serial connections are mostly commonly made through the USB connector on most Arduino boards, FTDI adaptor cables or bluetooth modules.
To setup a serial connection:
- Open a connection manager visualizer
- Choose one of the Serial Port entries from the Add Connection drop-down menu
MegunoLink detects connected devices and includes them in the list of available connections to save a configuration step. The port assigned to any connection can be changed on the configuration panel.
Create a new connection by selecting one of the Serial Port entries from the Add Connection menu.
MegunoLink will create a configuration panel for the new serial connection:
Serial port configuration panel
The title box lets you give the connection a name. This is useful to keep track when you have multiple connections. The name you enter here will be displayed on the connect button shown in visualizers.
Select the port and baud-rate your connection uses with the Port and Baud-rate controls. The baud-rate must match the value passed to Serial.begin(…) in your Arduino program. The most common value is 9,600 baud. If the baud-rate you need isn’t available in MegunoLink, you can customize the baud-rate list.
Click the Connect button to open the connection and begin receiving data. Only one program can use the port at any time so MegunoLink will show an error if another program already has the port open. Similarly if you have the connection open in MegunoLink you won’t be able to program your board from the Arduino IDE using the serial port unless you install our Arduino Integration component. Our Ardruino integration lets MegunoLink detect Arduino IDE programming and automatically disconnect the port.
Serial Reset
The Reset button can reset many Arduino devices. It uses the same method that the Arduino IDE uses: toggling the CTS or DTR pins. Use the Advanced settings dialog (see below) to control which pins MegunoLink toggles when you press the Reset button.
Disabling the DTR and/or RTS pins in the Advanced settings dialog (see below) can prevent the Arduino resetting whenever you open a serial connection. This allows you to attach MegunoLink and look at diagnostic output without restarting the program. You may have to experiment with which pins to disable and the board may reset once more after you disable the DTR/RTS pins or if you un-plug the serial connector. Some boards, such as the Leonardo, won’t work at all if DTR is disabled.
RS232 Configuration
Click the Advanced button to open the RS232 Configuration dialog. Here you can configure additional RS232 settings including the number of data-bits, handshaking, parity and the number of stop bits. Click Apply Template to restore the default Arduino settings.
You can override the handshake pin (DTR/CTS) pin behaviour disabling one or both of these outputs. Disabling these outputs will stop some Arduino’s from resetting whenever you open a connection.
Configure which pins MegunoLink toggles when you click the Reset on the serial configuration panel with the Reset Toggles DTR and Reset Toggles RTS checkboxes. The Reset button on the serial configuration panel will briefly toggle the enabled pins. On devices that use serial bootloaders, this can reset the board.
Click the Advanced for additional configuration for serial connections
