Not that kind of Cereal.  
Serializing is when you squish information into a tiny stream of 1s and 0s.  The great thing about it, is it allows you to send this information over little pipes and wires !   You can move information around. You can make things change remotely. What are we waiting for ?

The Serial service allows you to do that, and now it's gotten better.  Most here are pretty experienced using Serial to connect to computer COM ports, but did you know it could connect to other pipes ?

Now, through the gui you can connect over TCP/IP pipes - one of the most common serial pipes in world ! Just put in the tcp://host:port of the thingy you want to connect. 

In this case I'm connecting to a very useful program called netcat .   You can turn it into a simple tcp/ip server with the following command :

netcat -lp 8080

This tells netcat to listen on port 8080.  It will allow a tcp/ip connection and stream the in/out to the screen. Now you start a Serial service, and with my latest updates you can specify a port of 

tcp://localhost:8080

Press connect and   They are connected !

Pretty cool right ?  Should be available in ver 1953

So if there was an ESP8266 instead of netcat with a simple tcp/ip server you could potentially attach it as an Arduino.  

More Stuff: 

  • I'd like to get different displays/codecs working in the rx & tx buffers - like ascii or hex at the least
  • There should be a (do not monitor) button for performance, as printing to the gui can be expensive when there are megs of data flowing through the serial line
  • Creating virtual ports should be a "one clicky" thing
  • lots other things I can't think of the moment :)

calamity

7 years 9 months ago

Great stuff GroG!!!

I few week ago I try to set a tcp/ip server in MrlComm to work with a ESP8266. I have get it to the point where I can connect to MRL, but I couln't exchange any data as is get immediatly disconnected. I couln't found a solution for that so I leave it alone for a bit. But with that, it probably worth trying again

 

Great work

I tested by creating a small sketch on the esp8266 that I picked up from https://github.com/esp8266/Arduino/blob/master/libraries/ESP8266WiFi/ex…

I just made a few changes to it to display the data the same way as the Ardino service show it.

It works great to write from MRL to the ESP8266. So I think this method can work to add support for MRLComm on the ESP8266. If I use a telnet client, I can see the data echo back to the telnet client.