The Serial Studio Blog
Plain-language guides to serial ports, MQTT, CAN bus and Modbus, plus how to see live data without building a dashboard.
How to Read Data From a Serial Port
If you have wired up an Arduino, an ESP32, a GPS module, or almost any microcontroller, you have used a serial port, probably without thinking much about what it is. It is worth understanding, because a few minutes on the basics will save you hours of chasing "garbage on the screen" later.
Read the story →
Activate Serial Studio Pro Offline
Some of the machines that run Serial Studio never touch the internet. Industrial benches, locked-down deployments, and genuinely air-gapped systems cannot do a normal online license check. Offline activation exists for exactly these cases: instead of validating over the network, the machine imports a signed license file that you fetch once from the activation website.
2 min read
Why Serial Studio Has a Pro License
I get a version of this question often: if Serial Studio is open source, why isn't it just free? It is a fair thing to ask, and it deserves an honest answer rather than a marketing one. So here is the whole story, including how the license actually works and why it is built this way.
7 min read
Build Serial Studio From Source (GPLv3)
Serial Studio's core is free and open source under the GPLv3, and building it yourself is straightforward. You might do it to run the fully open edition, to audit what the app does, or to contribute a fix. This walks through the requirements and the build on each platform. It follows the instructions in the project's repository, which is the source of truth if anything here drifts.
3 min read
A Serial Monitor for macOS
On Windows, when you need to look at a serial port you reach for PuTTY, RealTerm, or the vendor's tool. On macOS there is no equivalent that ships with the system. You get two command-line utilities, screen and cu, and that is the whole toolbox. For a lot of people this is the first surprise after switching to a Mac for embedded work.
3 min read
What Is the CAN Bus, and How Do You Read It?
Open the hood of any car built in the last thirty years and you are looking at a CAN bus. It is also common in industrial machines, electric drivetrains, and any embedded system spread across more than one board. If you have ever wanted to read the data flowing through one, it helps to understand what CAN is first, because it behaves differently from the serial and network links most people start with.
3 min read
What Is Modbus? A Field Guide
Modbus is one of the oldest protocols still in daily use, and if you work anywhere near factory floors, building automation, or energy metering, you will run into it. It is refreshingly simple once the vocabulary clicks. This is a practical tour of what Modbus is and how to read a device that speaks it.
3 min read
What Is MQTT? See a Live Feed in Minutes
MQTT is the messaging protocol that quietly runs a large part of the connected world, from home-automation sensors to industrial telemetry. If you have seen it mentioned in IoT tutorials and never quite pinned down what it does, this is the short version, followed by a way to watch a real MQTT feed in a couple of minutes without buying anything.
3 min read
Time, Samples, or a Custom X Axis
When you put a signal on a chart you are really plotting two things: the value on the Y axis, and whatever you are measuring it against on the X axis. Most tools quietly assume the X axis is time and never ask. That default is usually right, but not always, and the cases where it is wrong are exactly the ones that produce a "my graph looks weird" moment. Serial Studio lets a plot use one of three kinds of X axis, and picking the right one clears up a surprising amount of confusion.
4 min read
From Raw Counts to Real Units
A sensor almost never hands you the number you actually want. A 10-bit ADC gives you 0 to 1023, not volts. A thermistor gives you counts, not degrees. A load cell gives you millivolts, not kilograms. Somewhere between the raw reading and the dashboard, that value has to become a real, calibrated engineering quantity. The interesting question is where that conversion should happen.
4 min read
No, Your Device Doesn't Have to Send JSON
Here is one of the most common misunderstandings about Serial Studio, and it has tripped up a lot of people over the years. Somebody sees the Project Editor described as editing "JSON project files," or notices the project saves as a .ssproj (which is JSON), and concludes that their microcontroller has to output JSON. Then they go write a JSON serializer on an 8-bit micro, watch it eat their flash and their loop time, and wonder why such a simple task got so hard.
2 min read
How Serial Studio Turns Bytes Into Datasets
Serial Studio is built on one idea: the device sends data, and the host decides what that data means. "Deciding what it means" can happen in a few different places, and knowing which one to use is the difference between a dashboard that behaves and one that mysteriously records every value twice. This post walks through the options from simplest to most involved, and explains a case that surprises people: when the frame parser is supposed to be empty on purpose.
4 min read
Serial Studio Isn't Just for Serial Ports
The name sets an expectation that the app comfortably exceeds. Serial Studio did begin as a tool for serial ports, and that is still the most common way people use it. But under the hood it is a general real-time data dashboard, and the serial port is only one of ten ways to feed it. If you have been reaching for a different tool the moment your data left the USB cable, this is worth two minutes.
3 min read
What Is Serial Studio?
When people first hear the name "Serial Studio," they usually picture a serial-port terminal. That is where it started, but it is not what it is now. Serial Studio is a cross-platform desktop application that takes a live stream of data from a device and turns it into a real-time dashboard: plots, gauges, maps, 3D views, and more. This is a short tour of what it does and how the pieces fit together.
3 min read