Setting up Picocom - Ubuntu

Picocom is a minimal dumb-terminal emulation program that is great for accessing a serial port based Linux console; which is typical done when developing an embedded Linux based product.

Installing picocom

On Ubunt, you can simply

sudo apt-get install picocom

Running picocom

You need to know the name of the serial port. Also, you should have read/write permissions to the serial port. Typical serial port names are /dev/ttyS0 for PCs with a built-in serial port and /dev/ttyUSB0 if you are using a USB to serial dongle.

picocom is wonderful in that you can specify all the serial port setting as parameters on the command line. For 115,200 baud (-b 115200), 8 bits (default setting), no parity (default setting), no flow control (default setting), and with no port reset (-r) and no port locking (-l), use:

picocom -b 115200 -r -l /dev/ttyUSB0

To exit picocom, use CNTL-A followed by CNTL-X.

For a brief overview on how Ubuntu works with overlaying text, visit our Fast GStreamer overlay element wiki page.