How to Use the Arduino Serial Monitor

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Using the Arduino serial monitor

The video below covers some basics on serial communication. Then, we dive into some code and demonstrate the Arduino serial monitor.

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What is Serial Data Transmission?

When I say serial communication, I’m not talking about the junk you eat in the morning.

The Arduino uses a USB cable to communicate with the PC. USB stands for universal serial bus and has pretty much taken over.

Serial communication transmits one bit of data at a time. This may seem inefficient, but it happens really, really fast.

Another, older and obsolete way to transmit data is in parallel.

You may remember parallel cables and the parallel port if you owned a PC in the 90’s or early 2000’s.

Here, data is chopped into chunks, say 8 bits, and then all bits are transmitted at the same time.

We won’t be concerning ourselves with parallel data transmission but it’s good know that it exits.

The Arduino Serial Monitor

The Arduino IDE comes with the serial library built in. A library is a bunch of similar functions that come in one neat, tidy package.

Here, we can see the functions inside the serial library on Arduino’s website.

Figure 1: Arduino serial library functions.

There’s a fair amount of them, but for the most part, you’ll use only a few of them most often. The Arduino serial library functions you’ll likely use the most are begin(), print(), and println().

Also, when the Arduino is communicating with the PC, you see the TX LED on the board. blinking this is a good indicator that the board is communicating with the PC.

For the code and serial monitor demonstration, please watch the video.

How often do you use Arduino’s serial monitor?

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