Multiple Serial Support

[luni64]

Teensy supports now multiple serial ports per device. (Here the corresponding pull request. PaulStoffregen/cores#438). This, of course is a great feature if you need to debug something which uses the normal Serial port for communication with the PC. As can be expected, the current tytools don't support this yet.

I tried it with the following sketch:

void setup()
{
  pinMode(LED_BUILTIN,OUTPUT);
}

void loop()
{
  Serial.printf("Serial %d\r\n", millis());
  SerialA.printf("SerialA %d\r\n", millis());   // Second Port

  digitalWriteFast(LED_BUILTIN,!digitalReadFast(LED_BUILTIN));
  delay(500);
}

Which works nicely. Both ports appear in Win10 and can be connected to with putty. However tytools gets confused. It does show the new ports in the info screen as shown below:

COM11 was the original port (not existing anymore) COM 29 and 30 are the two new ones.

But, unfortunately, reprogramming doesn't work. It looks like it looses the Teensy after programming. Probably it doesn't expect changed Ports Numbers?

Here MultiSerial.zip a HEX file with the sketch from above in case you want to give it a quick try. Would love if tytools could support this.

[Defragster]

Paul posted that this will be in the next TD beta for #1.52!
Very cool to have a way to separate debug Spew perhaps from core 'Sketch I/O'

@Koromix - nice if you have the time to work with this. Might help with Teensy 4 I/O speed two if the different 'ports' can be placed into different TyCommander windows. Also might make it easier for future work to leave primary ports as it is and put VT100 support on other(s).

[Koromix]

Hi,
I've started to work on this but it will take some time to do properly.
Still, here's what I've got so far after some hacking:

[luni64]

Cool, looking forward to get this. Will make debugging MUCH nicer.

I don't know if you noticed, meanwhile all ports can be used to reboot the teensy. The hex I posted above was done with an older version where only one port accepted reboot requests.

[Koromix]

Yes this works already.

I need to clean up the changes needed (right now some parts are hacked in) and work on proper board settings for multiple serials per Teensy.
And I'd like to show in the GUI that the two Teensies are linked somehow, with one of them being the "master" (ideally Serial and not SerialUSB1 / etc.).

[luni64]

And I'd like to show in the GUI that the two Teensies are linked somehow, with one of them being the "master" (ideally Serial and not SerialUSB1 / etc.).

Yes, while I was playing with Putty I already noticed that identifying Serials looking at the port numbers gets confusing quickly. A clear indication which port corresponds to which Serial would be helpful indeed.

[Koromix]

I will work on this more later, but in the meantime you can find a build with early multi-serial support here: https://koromix.dev/files/tytools/

[Defragster]

Nice work Koromix! - not tested yet - but looking forward to it.

[Defragster]

Just tested with current PJRC from github.

It shows three 'Teensy' from one Teensy 4.0!

PROBLEM - maybe this is known future work: The goal is each of the three should have their own 'Serial' output GUI window, currently all three map to the same GUI window.

[luni64]

The goal is each of the three should have their own 'Serial' output GUI window, currently all three map to the same GUI window.

Yes, will be useful sometimes. Usually, if I have more than one port per Teensy (which needed USB Serial cables in the past...) I simply open a second window. Advantage is that you can see both terminals in parallel.

It would be good to be able to have a color setting (say title bar, or some other visible part of the GUI) The setting should be stored based on Teensy ID + selected Port. This would make it easy to identify the port/terminal on a glace.

[Defragster]

I just noticed that each of the 3 instances on the options tab do point to a unique TEMP file!
So the output is logged exclusively to a unique file for each.
There may be times when 'all on one would make sense' - but my expected use for this was 'multimon' type use to see DEBUG SPEW and USEFUL key info on separate GUI pages.

Also hoping that will split the output load from the faster Teensy 4.0 in a way that total throughput between the 2 or 3 windows might exceed what one can do now.

[Koromix]

I'm not sure I understand, and I can't retest it right now, but if you open two TyCommander windows and set each one to a different "Teensy port" you should be able to watch both outputs at the same time?

[Koromix]

And you can use the compact window mode with Ctrl+H or "View > Compact Mode" to reduce used screen space.

[Defragster]

Let me check - I didn't read the code - it is doing something unexpected …