Serial Terminal View in Eclipse Luna

Posted on April 20, 2015 by Erich Styger

If you have read my article “Serial Terminal View with Eclipse Kepler“, then you are aware that using a Terminal view to a serial connection (COM port) under Eclipse Kepler is pretty much broken. I’m moving some of my projects to the more recent Eclipse Luna release, and the good news is that support is back 🙂

Terminal View with connection to board

Installation

Use the menu Help > Install New Software and use

http://download.eclipse.org/releases/luna

as update site. Under ‘Mobile and Device Development’, select ‘TCF Terminal (Console) View‘:

TCF Terminal (Console) View

Then go through the installation process, an Eclipse restart is needed at the end as asked.

This installs a new Terminals view under ‘Target Explorer Views‘:

Target Explorer Terminal View

This opens the Terminals view. There is an icon to open a new Terminal connection:

Open a Terminal

Select ‘Serial Terminal‘ from the dialog:

Serial Terminal

💡 If you use ‘Local Terminal’, then it creates another cool thing: a local consola, aka DOS shell on Windows 🙂

You might now face the issue that no COM port is listed (at least for me on Windows):

Launch Terminal

The issue is that the RXTX plugins need to be installed too. You need to do another Help > Install New Software from this site:

http://rxtx.qbang.org/eclipse

Install the latest plugin:

RXTX Plugins Installation

Go trough the installation process, restart Eclipse as asked.

With this, I have the COM ports listed:

COM Port Listed

❗ I still have sometimes slow refresh/dialog issues to list the COM ports, probably because I have many of them listed?

With this, I have now a console/terminal view in Eclipse Luna which I can use to talk to my boards using a serial/COM interface:

Terminal View with connection to board

💡 Use the ‘Toggle Command Input Field’ to have a command line input field.

Summary

I’m using mostly an external terminal program like Termite. But it is a very useful thing to have a terminal view in Eclipse so I do not need to switch to another application. All what is needed is the installation of a plugin plus the RXTX (at least on Windows). And best of all: it comes with telnet, SSH and local shell too :-).

Happy Terminaling 🙂

30 thoughts on “Serial Terminal View in Eclipse Luna”

Michael Müller on May 15, 2015 at 14:56 said:

Thank you for the guide. For my eclipse 64-bit executable it did not work. With the 32-bit version it works!

LikeLike

Reply ↓
- Erich Styger on May 15, 2015 at 16:25 said:
  
  Hi Michael, yes, I have seen a similar report about this. Not sure why it works better on 32bit version of Windows, and I’m using 64bit if Windows-7.
  
  LikeLike
  
  Reply ↓
TM on June 4, 2015 at 19:08 said:

Thanks – great tip.
It worked for me using Eclipse Luna 32 bit on Win 7 64 bit.
Also worked on Eclipse Luna 32 bit on CentOS 6.6 32 bit.
Haven’t tried it on other platforms yet (e.g. CentOS 7, CentOS 64 bit etc.).
My board has an FTDI FT4232 device which appears as 4 COM ports on Windows or /dev/ttyUSBn on Linux and once I find the right one (usually the highest numbered one) it connects to my target fine.

LikeLike

Reply ↓
Bruce Boyes on June 26, 2015 at 03:41 said:

Well, grrr. I was optimistic. I have the 64-bit Luna installed and still can’t see the serial ports.

LikeLike

Reply ↓
- Erich Styger on June 26, 2015 at 03:42 said:
  
  Yes, I had a hard time with 64bit too, but there are reports that it is better under 32bit.
  
  LikeLike
  
  Reply ↓
  - robross0606 on December 7, 2015 at 17:54 said:
    
    This works with 64-bit just fine if you install the 64-bit binaries for RXTX on your JRE.
    
    http://fizzed.com/oss/rxtx-for-java
    
    LikeLike
    
    Reply ↓
    - Erich Styger on December 8, 2015 at 10:41 said:
      
      Hello,
      thanks for that link and information. I tried that, and followed the instructions in the zip file, but this still did not work for me 😦
      
      LikeLike
Pingback: Using Segger Real Time Terminal (RTT) with Eclipse | MCU on Eclipse
Patrick on June 17, 2016 at 16:24 said:

Hi Erich,
How to output message in external terminal ?
I’m using semihosting to output messages in Eclipse console and I want to output messages to an external terminal (termite, putty, realterm …whataever).
But when I connect to the telnet client with putty using the following configuration:
host:localhost
port=19201

I don’t receive anything.
Any tips or ideas ?
Thanks

LikeLike

Reply ↓
- Erich Styger on June 18, 2016 at 15:51 said:
  
  Hi Patrick,
  that depends on the debug connection (P&E, Segger, ….). You would need to setup the semihosting in the debugger settings to use a telnet port too.
  
  LikeLike
  
  Reply ↓
  - Patrick on June 20, 2016 at 11:14 said:
    
    I’m setting the telnet port in the debug connection. I can connect to the JLinkGDBServer in telnet mode with putty but the semihosting console is always printing messages not in putty console.
    
    The semihosting is not giving the hand to the external console ?
    
    LikeLike
    
    Reply ↓
    - Erich Styger on June 20, 2016 at 12:13 said:
      
      Same for me. Not sure what is missing.
      
      LikeLike
Patrick on June 20, 2016 at 15:48 said:

It is working now. Following commands should be used:
1 monitor semihosting enable
2 semihosting IOClient 1 #print output via telnet
3 telnet client config: localhost and 2333 (port number is 2333 not 19021)

LikeLike

Reply ↓
- Erich Styger on June 20, 2016 at 21:10 said:
  
  Hi Patrick,
  interesting, and I’m wondering how you were able to find this out. I have not found any reference like this 😦
  Erich
  
  LikeLike
  
  Reply ↓
Patrick on June 21, 2016 at 16:44 said:

Hi Erich,
Semihosting part in Jlink manual gives further details about it.
Patrick

LikeLike

Reply ↓
Hafizudin Johari on October 13, 2016 at 17:50 said:

Hi Erich,
Why I cannot see the serial monitor? Im using Eclipse Neon.1
I know it is a little outdated but can you tell me the solution?
I have installed all the files required including RXTX and others.

Regards,
Din

LikeLike

Reply ↓
- Erich Styger on October 13, 2016 at 19:54 said:
  
  Hi Din,
  for me, that functionality is broken for a very long time already. The RXTX projects seems unsupported and not maintained any more. To bad 😦
  
  LikeLike
  
  Reply ↓
  - TM on May 12, 2017 at 11:12 said:
    
    Anybody else notice that http://rxtx.qbang.org/eclipse seems to be dead yesterday/today?
    
    LikeLike
    
    Reply ↓
    - Erich Styger on May 12, 2017 at 12:41 said:
      
      yes, down for me too. I have created a backup a while back here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/mcuoneclipse/files/Eclipse%20Plugins/RxTx/
      
      LikeLike
- EFats on July 20, 2017 at 23:17 said:
  
  Did not work for me on Neon, but I installed Oxygen and oddly, it works there (following the instructions in the original post).
  The only problem I have now is the selectable serial baud rate only goes up to 115200. I don’t suppose anyone knows a way to bump it higher? I need it up to 230400 (odd, yes, but there’s a particular device with dev board that is fixed at this rate).
  
  LikeLike
  
  Reply ↓
  - EFats on July 20, 2017 at 23:18 said:
    
    I should note that this is on Win10 64-bit using 64-bit Eclipse installer.
    
    LikeLike
    
    Reply ↓
  - Erich Styger on July 21, 2017 at 10:03 said:
    
    I have not tried it with Oxygen, so thanks for that idea to try it out there.
    As for going above 115200: this usually does not work as depending on the UART device you have the needed clock accuracity is not guaranteed. If you really need 230400, you might be better off implementing this on a small micrcontroller board where you have control over it?
    
    LikeLike
    
    Reply ↓
    - EFats on July 22, 2017 at 05:46 said:
      
      I’m not sure it actually works with a “real” UART device. This typically goes over a USB-UART adapter. Normally we use it with any terminal program (such as TeraTerm or whatever) and it works flawlessly. We have probably hundreds of setups and they all work fine.
      I actually did some poking around with the company supplied dev/debug tool and they actually rely on RxTx to handle the terminal in their tool, though likely patched to work at such speeds.
      
      LikeLike
    - Erich Styger on July 22, 2017 at 08:57 said:
      
      A machine with a ‘real’ UART is hard to find these days. USB-CDC (or UART over USB) can work in most cases, but it depends on the USB CDC implementation (flow control, buffers, etc), so I had mixed experience with it. With all the issues with the serial connection in Eclipse I switched over to use an external terminal program (Termite, putty, etc) which worked much better.
      
      LikeLike
TM on May 14, 2017 at 19:45 said:

Hi Erich – thanks a lot for the mirror. Much appreciated.

BTW – for some reason (again?) I can’t reply to your post but can only post a new (?) comment.

LikeLike

Reply ↓
- TM on May 14, 2017 at 19:50 said:
  
  One other thing – the readme says to download the zip, unpack it and then point to it from the Eclipse Install New Software option. However there is not need to unpack the zip as far as I can see and you can simply download the zip and then use this to point at it without unpacking it first:
  
  Help > Install New Software… > Add… > Archive…
  
  Hope this helps.
  
  LikeLike
  
  Reply ↓
  - Erich Styger on May 14, 2017 at 19:57 said:
    
    ah, yes, that’s indeed another possiblility, thanks for sharing!
    
    LikeLike
    
    Reply ↓
Katrin on August 19, 2017 at 18:54 said:

Thanks. it works with Neon (on Windows 7, 64bit).
I followed your guide and after installing the rxtx plugin, I installed the link http://fizzed.com/oss/rxtx-for-java.

LikeLike

Reply ↓
- Erich Styger on August 20, 2017 at 20:29 said:
  
  Hi Katrin,
  I did not think that this could work, this is great! And thanks for that link to the rxtx binaris, that’s very useful.
  I quickly tried things on Eclipse Oxygen, and here after installing the terminal plugin (I installed all the TM Terminal views and the TCF Target Explorer) it seems that I don’t need the RXTX libraries, as I can directly communicate with the COM port (at least on Windows).
  🙂
  
  LikeLike
  
  Reply ↓
Pingback: Using Serial Terminal and COM Support in Eclipse Oxygen and Neon | MCU on Eclipse