serial-monitor

a small generic utility application to communicate with serial ports. using a small swing user interface. this is still under construction and is probably going to change a lot. it also served as a prototype to understand basics of JSerialComm library and monocle library. moreover it was the demo application during my talk about optics. there are also some DEMO comments around in the code. it has more an educational purpose. however, there are still flaws within this application.

technology stack

there are a bunch of libraries being used:

technology	usage
jSerialComm	portable serial communication
monocle-core	optics to update model
monocle-macro	auto-generate optics
radiance-substance	substance Look&Feel for swing
fs2-core	queue for message passing
fs2-io	IO monad bindings for Queue
cats-core	traverse options and lists with IO
cats-effect	IO monad

architecture

swing code is inherently unsafe because side effects occur almost everywhere. the application uses a self-made micro framework to wrap swing code. UI is the central abstraction that takes care of the key features.

• maintain application State in an MRef
• maintain a queue of messages in an fs2.Queue
• maintain a list of views that subscribe to messages
• update model when new messages arrive
• announce model update to views
• execute view updates on EDT (swings event dispatch thread)

hardware

the application communicates with devices plugged into the machine. during the demo 3 arduino compatible boards (teensy 3.2) have been used. the code running on each of these 3 controllers had this shape:

const int  sps            = 100;
const long serialRate     = 9600;
int counter = 0;

void setup() {
  pinMode(LED_BUILTIN, OUTPUT);
  SerialUSB.begin(serialRate);
}

void loop() {
  SerialUSB.read();
  SerialUSB.print(counter);
  SerialUSB.print('\t');
  SerialUSB.print(-counter);
  SerialUSB.print('\t');
  SerialUSB.print(2 * counter);
  SerialUSB.print('\n');
  counter = (counter + 1) % 256;
  digitalWrite(LED_BUILTIN, counter % 2 ? HIGH : LOW);
  delay(1000 / sps);
}

data

such a device then acts as a sensor and therefore continuously streams data. the format are newline separated rows and tab separated columns.

0       -0       0
1       -1       2
2       -2       4
...
88      -88      176
89      -89      178
90      -90      180
...
254     -254     508
255     -255     510
0       -0       0
...