DroidTerm PRO 1.2: Multi Character Encoding Support

I am happy to announce that DroidTerm PRO finally supports different character encodings which can be useful to connect with some legacy systems that still uses things like the CodePage 437 to extend ASCII. Current character encodings are:

– ASCII
– ISO 8859-1
– UTF-8 (set by default)
– UTF-16
– CP437

To change the character encoding, press the menu button in the upper right corner and select character encoding.
Screenshot_2015-09-24-18-39-35

There are tons of legacy encodings there so I probably will add some of them in next months.

More information about DroidTerm Pro and its free version
Happy crafting!

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DroidTerm 7.1 and DroidTerm PRO 1.2: Usb Serial port terminal for Android

Finally new updates on DroidTerm! I managed to fix the first and foremost bug that was present on previous releases of DroidTerm, the unresponsive scroll when data was received. The text renderer is completely new and it offers and smooth scroll and keeps the app responsive.

After much thought I’ve decided to split DroidTerm into two apps, one free (with ads) that contains the same features, plus the scroll fix, than previous versions and other paid version with no ads and more features.

DroidTerm FREE
DroidTerm PRO

My intention is to keep the Free version stable as it is useful for the common user and add more complex features to the PRO version.
Try first the free sure to be sure it fits your needs, if you need the PRO features or you find DroidTerm useful and you want to help in its further development consider buying the PRO version.

If you prefer you can donate via Paypal tu support further improvements

DroidTerm PRO new features: VT100 Terminal emulator
DroidTerm PRO allows to send a subset of the ANSI control escape sequences. Designing a good interface to support this feature has been more complicated than I thought. Instead of relying purely on the Android keyboard the ‘ESC’ and the ‘[‘ button are check buttons that can be set to ON or OFF, the rest of the command must be written in a field. When the command ready, press the ‘Send’ button.

Screenshot_2015-09-10-22-51-07
ESC[2J escape sequence will erase the screen and move the cursor to home

Some systems echo back whatever you send but in some configurations need local echo. Local echo can be ON/OFF easily by the checkboxes below the the ANSI escape sequences.

DroidTerm Pro new Feature: Different character encodings

DroidTerm features explained in previous posts

USB Viewer
Logs and Hex viewer
Log viewer and Bulk transfer
Connection profiles
Profiles automatically create a default log file. LF CR and LF-CR End of line options added
CH340/CH341 supported, those cheap Arduino clones should be working now 🙂

Both versions use UsbSerial to handle serial port which is free, open source and can boost your projects too!

DroidTerm started as a little serial port terminal, it was buggy as hell in the first release with a very slow scroll and a lack of features but now it is unrecognizable! I started this because other options for serial ports were disappointing and I can state that right now is probably the best out there for Android, probably still not the PuTTy replacement for Android but who knows.. 🙂

Happy crafting!

DroidTerm v3.0 USB Serial Port for Android

Last information about the current state of DroidTerm. Please check it out

I uploaded a new version of DroidTerm some days ago with some changes I would like to share with you. First of all, I decided to drop Bluetooth SPP (Serial Port Profile) support from DroidTerm. I did not consider it my first goal when I started to develop my app. I was struggling to find a great replacement in Android for Putty as a serial terminal so that became my first objective and, eventually, I decided to add support of Bluetooth SPP because it would be a not difficult task. Months later I spent hours refining the USB serial interface of DroidTerm adding devices, fixing bugs… so now It is pretty stable. Unfortunately I almost forgot completely about bluetooth. So it was not so stable at all and I have decide to focus on USB stuff.

Now the good things! You can generate logs of your sessions and keep them for further study. Saving a log of your session is easy:
– Connect your USB-Serial device and configure it as you want.
– Press options button whenever you want.
Screenshot_2014-08-14-17-19-24
– Select “Save Log” and your session will be saved in a folder called DroidTerm in your SD card. Files follow this name convention:

YYYY_MM_DD__HH__MM_SS.txt

The text files generated by DroidTerm save not only raw data (Text or Hex representation as We will see next) but metadata of session too.

#Date: 2014/08/06 13:58:19
#Device Name: FT232 USB-Serial (UART) IC
#Baud rate: 9600
#Data bits: 8
#Stop bits: 1
#Parity: None
#Flow: None

0x6C 0x6B 0x6B 0x6C 0x6B 0x6B 0x6C 0x6A 0x64 0x64 0x61 0x61 0x61 0x61 0x41 0x41 0x41 0x41 0x41 0x41 0x41 0x41 0x41 0x41 0x41 0x41 0x41 0x41 0x41 0x41 0x41 0x41 0x41 0x41 0x41 0x41 0x41 0x41 0x20 0x4D 0x65 0x20 0x6C 0x6C 0x61 0x6D 0x6F 0x20 0x46 0x65 0x6C 0x69 0x70 0x65 0x20 0x79 0x20 0x65 0x6F 0x73 0x20 0x66 0x69 0x66 0x6A 0x64 0x6E 0x20 

The next improvement, as you may noticed before, is a Hexadecimal representation of received data. I missed that really useful feature when you are debugging, or gaining understanding of a protocol and you need the raw data.

Here an example received from a scrollable LED with String representation:

Screenshot_2014-08-14-17-51-36

Obviously except first bytes information is not encoded at all. So Hex mode is necessary to study how this scrollable Led communicates with host:

Screenshot_2014-08-14-17-52-12

I have more improvements in mind but They will have to wait for a next release.

Happy craft!

DroidTerm: A serial port terminal emulator for Android

Last information about the current state of DroidTerm. Please check it out

During my most recent work I had to deal a lot with serial ports and Usb to serial converters. Most of the work used an Android device as a host of a usb-serial converter to send commands through a serial connection to a custom hardware we developed. I certainly missed a good replacement of PuTTY for Android. Some apps I encountered are faulty or does not support the converters I am using for. That is the reason because I started to develop my own replacement.
Finally I shipped the first version of this app that I called DroidTerm.
Here it is the link if you are interested

Features:
– Allows serial connections over Bluetooth Serial Port Profile and Usb.
– It supports FTDI chipsets (nice for Arduino stuff), CP210x family of chipsets and soon Prolific pl2303 chipsets. Not only defaults VID and PID, it supports custom VID and PIDS of other manufacturers too.
– In Usb serial connection, baud rate, data bits, stop bits, parity can be configurable before connection. Flow control is still not supported.

There is plenty of room for new features and improvements:
– Flow control and almost more importantly, a interface to handle it manually.
– Send through serial port a selected filed from a file explorer.
– Macros (Implement a simple BASIC-like language and a simple interface to code on mobile devices would be awesome).
– Add more not supported devices, although that must be done on Usb Serial android library
– Design improvement, that is not my best area so do not expect something much better than the retro style it has now.

If you use it, you find it useful and you have some new ideas or improvements I would love to hear them.

Happy craft!

UPDATE: Devices with PL2303 chipsets are now supported. I would like some feedback about this new feature 🙂
https://lh3.ggpht.com/Ms-VlbxWea5n3yUDqsx1ZZcjswxA-cpR4xC35XcYOszlszUUfXvDq8tkozQ9vKihXvOt=h900-rw

https://lh5.ggpht.com/RSMTKtvYHBNPkMuwiGlRju8iCjq8JW8VQvOVphDYf0gsa-nu7Vk8RNCbXaMqhDGkfA-J=h900-rw