cp2102

DroidTerm PRO 1.2: Multi Character Encoding Support

felhr DroidTerm Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

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

felhr DroidTerm Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 8 Comments

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: A serial port terminal emulator for Android

felhr DroidTerm Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 46 Comments

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

A little library to use Serial Port in Android

felhr Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

THIS POST IS NOT UPDATED ABOUT USBSERIAL. PLEASE CHECK OUT THIS LINK

During my struggles with Bluetooth Low Energy (I have to write a burst of serious posts about this technology still in its infancy of opportunities but pretty promising) I had to deal with Bluetooth low energy modules and dongles made by Bluegiga. Bluegiga has made them pretty easy to use and it is possible to program them as a standalone bluetooth unit totally independent of where it is connected.

The problem arrives when you want to use this technology with Android devices. Android Bluetooth low energy support is relatively new (4.3) but there are a few capable devices of handling this connections. Most of them at this moment qualify as High-End Android phones or tablets.

There is another problem, Bluetooh low energy is a modern cool saving battery piece of engineering but It is not a best bluetooth. A simple example, if you want to stream data Do not use it, or use it at your own. In Android is worse, I compared data rate of Bluegiga modules and Android nexus 7 tablet and data rate was better in Bluegiga dongles. (I guess that is the prize of being far to the metal).

So I needed to connect my BLED112 Bluegiga dongles to Android as a Serial port devices, in order to do that I coded a little library to do it. I added support to CP210x USB to UART device. More devices must be added and some improves too, but I think it is not a bad piece of code and can get the job done.

It is not so asynchronous as I wanted (Read operations are asynchronous but write operations, if performed in a asynchronous way cause an awful bug involving Segmentation faults. This hideous bug was reported but It still there…

If you want to use it, just download the jar file from and added it to libs folder in your android project. Follow instructions to use it.

If you want to add something just let me know. Final device classes still shared code that could be moved to base class so I would rather refactor the code before adding new features.

Enjoy it!