Tkinter Serial Monitor Tutorial: Create a Python GUI for Serial Communication

In this tutorial, we will learn how to create a Python GUI for serial communication using the Tkinter library. Tkinter is a built-in Python library for creating graphical user interfaces, making it easy for developers to create interactive applications with buttons, menus, and other widgets. We will use it to create a serial monitor that can send and receive data from a connected device.

Setting up the Serial Connection

First, we need to establish a serial connection with the device we want to communicate with. We can use the PySerial library in Python to open a serial port and configure the communication settings such as baud rate and parity. Here is an example code snippet to do this:

import serial

ser = serial.Serial('COM4', 9600) # Change COM4 to the port of your device

Creating the Tkinter GUI

Now, let’s create a simple Tkinter GUI with a text widget for displaying the received data and an entry widget for sending data. Here is an example code snippet to create the GUI:

import tkinter as tk

root = tk.Tk()
text_widget = tk.Text(root)
text_widget.pack()

entry_widget = tk.Entry(root)
entry_widget.pack()

root.mainloop()

Implementing Sending and Receiving Data

Next, we need to implement the functionality to send and receive data over the serial connection. We can use the ‘write’ method of the serial port object to send data and the ‘readline’ method to receive data. Here is an example code snippet to do this:

def send_data():
    data = entry_widget.get()
    ser.write(data.encode())

def receive_data():
    received_data = ser.readline().decode()
    text_widget.insert(tk.END, received_data)

send_button = tk.Button(root, text="Send", command=send_data)
send_button.pack()

receive_button = tk.Button(root, text="Receive", command=receive_data)
receive_button.pack()

Running the Serial Monitor

Finally, we can run the serial monitor by calling the ‘mainloop’ method of the Tkinter root object. This will start the GUI and allow us to interact with the connected device through the serial port. Here is the complete code to create the serial monitor:

import tkinter as tk
import serial

ser = serial.Serial('COM4', 9600) # Change COM4 to the port of your device

root = tk.Tk()
text_widget = tk.Text(root)
text_widget.pack()

entry_widget = tk.Entry(root)
entry_widget.pack()

def send_data():
    data = entry_widget.get()
    ser.write(data.encode())

def receive_data():
    received_data = ser.readline().decode()
    text_widget.insert(tk.END, received_data)

send_button = tk.Button(root, text="Send", command=send_data)
send_button.pack()

receive_button = tk.Button(root, text="Receive", command=receive_data)
receive_button.pack()

root.mainloop()

With this code, we have created a Python GUI for serial communication using the Tkinter library. We can now send and receive data from a connected device using a simple and interactive interface. This can be useful for debugging and testing devices that communicate over serial ports.