Quick Start

SerialFlow’s terminal mode gives you a fully interactive serial terminal in your browser — no account or installation required. Think PuTTY, but in a browser tab.

Prerequisites

  • A serial device (Arduino, ESP32, Raspberry Pi Pico, or anything with a USB-serial interface)
  • Chrome or Edge (WebSerial API support required — Firefox and Safari are not supported)

Step 1: Open Terminal

Go to serialflow.app/terminal. You’ll see a pre-configured workspace that’s already streaming: a Mock source feeding a Live Scope chart and a Log Terminal, so you can watch data move before you plug anything in. Below it, a serial device node named Connect your real device is wired to a User Terminal, ready for your hardware.

Step 2: Connect Your Device

  1. Plug your serial device into your computer via USB
  2. Double-click the Connect your real device node (or click the settings icon at its top-left) to open its settings
  3. Select your port, baud rate, and other serial parameters
  4. Click Connect

Your browser will prompt you to select a serial port — pick the one matching your device and grant access.

Step 3: Interact

Once connected, the User Terminal is a full read/write serial console. Type commands and they’re sent directly to your device; responses appear in real time.

Terminal Controls

Control What it does
Timestamps Prefix each line with an ISO 8601 timestamp (2026-02-03 14:05:12.345)
Pause / Resume Freeze the terminal output without disconnecting — handy for inspecting a burst of data
Clear Wipe the terminal display and scroll buffer
Copy Copy the full terminal contents to your clipboard
Echo Toggle local echo of what you type
Newline Mode Switch between LF (\n) and CRLF (\r\n) depending on your device

Step 4: Build A Pipeline (Still No Account)

The terminal workspace is a full graph editor. As a guest you can add, configure, connect, and delete nodes and run the resulting pipeline as an ephemeral session:

Node What it does
Serial device Your USB serial port via WebSerial
Remote source Data piped from another machine via serialflow pipe (requires a signed-in CLI)
Mock source Generated test data — try things without hardware
Lua Transform frames with a Lua script
Live Scope Rolling chart of numeric name:value channels
Log Terminal Read-only streaming output
Metrics sink Aggregate frame metrics

Click Run Flow to start the session. Guest sessions are ephemeral: nothing is persisted, and the session ends when you close or disconnect the browser tab.

Nodes that store or replay durable data — Playback source and Cloud file sink — need an account; they show a Sign in badge in the node palette.

What’s Next?

To save projects, record runs to the cloud, and replay saved data, create a free account — full access while we’re in alpha.