Serial Studio Help Center

Documentation for every part of Serial Studio: setup, data sources and drivers, frame parsers, dashboards and widgets, automation, recording and the developer APIs. Every topic below is a full page — link it, search it, or feed it to your favorite AI assistant. Each page also has a raw markdown twin at /help/<topic>.md.

Basics

Getting Started — Serial Studio is a cross-platform telemetry dashboard for visualizing real-time data from embedded devices, sensors, and other data sources.
Windows Installation — Serial Studio ships three ways on Windows, all 64-bit (x64) builds of the same application.
Linux Installation — Serial Studio ships three package formats for Linux, each available for x86_64 (x64) and ARM64 (arm64).
Operation Modes — Serial Studio has three parsing modes that determine how incoming data is interpreted and displayed.
Data Sources — Serial Studio connects to hardware and software data sources through ten driver types.
Toolbar & Button Reference — This page is the complete map of Serial Studio's buttons: the main toolbar at the top of the window, the dashboard Start menu and…
Command Palette — The command palette is a single search box that reaches every workspace, widget, tool, and command in Serial Studio without hunting…

Configuration

Project Editor — The Project Editor lets you create and edit JSON project files that define how Serial Studio interprets incoming data and displays it on…
Project Lock — A password gate for the Project Editor.
Operator Deployments — A deployment is a saved launcher that opens Serial Studio with a specific project file and a fixed set of command-line flags.
Actions — Actions let you put buttons on the Serial Studio dashboard that send commands back to the connected device.
Notifications — Dashboard-level notification system for publishing Info, Warning, and Critical events from frame parsers, dataset transforms, output…
Widget Reference — Serial Studio has 15+ widget types for real-time data visualization.
Plots — Serial Studio's line plots turn a stream of numbers into a moving chart.
Painter Widget — The Painter is a Pro dashboard widget that exposes a JavaScript paint(ctx, w, h) callback.
Output Controls — Output controls are interactive dashboard widgets that send data back to a connected device.

Scripting & Data Logic

Frame Parser Reference — Complete reference for Serial Studio's frame parser.
Control Loop (setup / loop) — The Control Loop automates a connected device the way an Arduino sketch does.
Dataset Value Transforms — Per-dataset scripting for calibration, unit conversion, filtering, and signal conditioning.
Data Tables — Shared registers that any dataset transform can read and write.
SDK Reference — Every script you write inside Serial Studio (a frame parser, a dataset transform, a Control Loop, an Output widget) runs with the Serial…

Connectivity

Communication Protocols — Serial Studio supports 10 communication protocols across wired serial links, wireless radios, network sockets, industrial buses, and…
Protocol Setup Guides — Step-by-step setup instructions for every communication protocol supported by Serial Studio.
Auto-Generating Projects — For three of the most painful protocol configurations, Serial Studio can build the project for you from a vendor file.
MQTT Topics & Semantics — MQTT is the standard publish/subscribe protocol for IoT.
MQTT Publisher — The MQTT Publisher pushes the data Serial Studio is already processing out to an MQTT broker, so other applications (dashboards on…
File Transmission — Serial Studio can send files to a connected device using plain text, raw binary, or industry-standard transfer protocols (XMODEM,…

Drivers

UART / Serial — The UART driver handles plain serial communication: USB-to-serial adapters, RS-232 ports, RS-485 buses, and Bluetooth Classic devices…
Network (TCP / UDP) — The Network driver is the right transport once a project outgrows a single USB cable: when the device is on another machine, behind a…
Bluetooth Low Energy — The Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) driver lets Serial Studio connect to any BLE peripheral that exposes its data through GATT services and…
Modbus — Modbus is a long-standing industrial protocol.
CAN Bus — The CAN Bus driver lets Serial Studio capture frames from a Controller Area Network.
Audio Input — The Audio driver lets Serial Studio treat any OS-level audio input device as an analog data source: microphones, line-in, audio…
Raw USB — The Raw USB driver talks to USB devices directly through libusb, bypassing the operating system's class drivers.
HID — The HID driver lets Serial Studio talk to USB Human Interface Device (HID) class peripherals: keyboards, mice, gamepads, joysticks,…
Process I/O — Process I/O is a Serial Studio Pro feature that lets Serial Studio ingest data from any external program.
MQTT Subscriber — The MQTT driver lets a project subscribe to one or more broker topics and feed each received message into the regular frame pipeline as…

Data Management

CSV Export & Playback — Serial Studio can export incoming telemetry to CSV during a live session and replay saved CSV files through the same data pipeline.
MDF4 Export & Playback — Serial Studio Pro can export incoming telemetry to MDF4 files during a live session and replay saved MDF4 files through the same data…
Session Database — Serial Studio Pro can record every connected session to a per-project SQLite database.
Session Reports — Serial Studio Pro can export any recorded session as a self-contained HTML report or a PDF.
Backups & Recovery — Serial Studio keeps rolling backups of your project so you can undo edits and recover from a mistake or a crash.

Integration

API Reference — The Serial Studio API Server is a TCP server that listens on port 7777 (default) and accepts JSON-formatted commands to control Serial…
Command-Line Interface — Serial Studio accepts command-line arguments for automation, headless operation, and benchmarking.
gRPC Server — Serial Studio exposes its entire API over gRPC on port 8888.
Plugin Development — Plugins are external programs that connect to Serial Studio's API to receive live data, compute statistics, display custom…
Extensions — Extensions are add-ons that extend Serial Studio.
AI Assistant — A chat-based assistant that lives inside Serial Studio and edits the project for you.

Architecture

Data Flow — Understanding how data moves through Serial Studio helps you configure it and debug issues.
The Data Hotpath — A technical reference for how a single byte travels from a connected device to a rendered widget, and how the frame parser and dataset…
Dataset Identity Model — A dataset in Serial Studio carries three integer identifiers: index, datasetId, and uniqueId.
Threading and Timing Guarantees — A short, honest description of what Serial Studio's hot path guarantees, what it doesn't, and why the threading model looks the way it does.
Benchmark Dialog — The Benchmark dialog measures how fast the machine you're running on can extract, parse, and visualize frames through Serial Studio's…

Support

About Serial Studio — Background, philosophy, and history of the project.
FAQ — Answers to common questions about Serial Studio, from installation to advanced use.
Glossary — A quick reference for the terms used throughout Serial Studio and this documentation.
Troubleshooting Guide — Quick solutions to common Serial Studio issues.
Use Cases — Real-world applications of Serial Studio across industries, education, and hobbyist projects.
Become an Affiliate — If you write tutorials, make videos, blog, or run a social account, you can earn money by helping more people find Serial Studio.
Comparison with Alternatives — A comparison of Serial Studio against other data visualization and telemetry tools.

Licensing

Pro vs Free Features — A comparison of features in the free (GPLv3) version against Serial Studio Pro.
Offline Activation — Offline activation unlocks Serial Studio Pro on a machine that never connects to the internet.
License Agreement — Serial Studio uses a dual-license model to balance open source collaboration with commercial sustainability.
Privacy Policy — Last updated: June 28, 2026 This policy describes how the Serial Studio desktop application handles your data.
Earn a Pro License — If Serial Studio is useful to you but buying a Pro license isn't an option, you can earn one by making meaningful contributions.
Support Serial Studio — Serial Studio is used by developers, engineers, educators, and makers around the world.