Communicating with your target over a serial connection

The Terminal view lets you open a serial communications program (e.g., HyperTerminal) to talk to your target and download images, without having to leave the IDE.
To communicate with your target over a serial connection:
  1. Connect your target and host machines with a serial cable.
  2. In the IDE, open the Terminal view by selecting, from the main menu, Window > Show View > Other…, then selecting Terminal > Terminal, and then clicking OK.
    The view opens (by default, it's shown at the bottom).
  3. From the Terminal view toolbar, click the Connect icon ().

    This brings up the Terminal Settings window, in which you can define the type and other properties of the connection:

  4. In the Connection Type dropdown list, select Serial.
  5. Specify the port (e.g., COM1 or COM2) and the other communication parameters (baud rate, parity, data bits, stop bits, etc).
  6. Click OK.

The IDE establishes the serial connection and you can now interact with your target by typing in the view.

By default on Linux hosts, the owner (root) and the group (uucp) have read-write permission on all /dev/ttyS* serial devices; users outside this group have no access. If you're logged in as a non-root user and you aren't a member of the uucp group, then the Terminal view doesn't show any serial devices to select from, since you don't have access rights to any of them. To work around this problem, add non-root users to the uucp group.

Even after the link is established, you can change the connection parameters from the view's menu:
The Terminal view