When working with an Arduino, you often want the serial console to stay open, for debugging. However, while you have the serial console open, uploading will not work (because the upload relies on the DTR pin going from high to low, which happens when opening up the serial port, but not if it's already open). The official IDE includes a serial console, which automatically closes when you start an upload (and once this pullrequest is merged, automatically reopens it again).

However, of course I'm not using the GUI serial console in the IDE, but minicom, a text-only serial console I can run inside my screen. Since the IDE (which I do use for compiling uploading, by calling it on the commandline using a Makefile - I still use vim for editing) does not know about my running minicom, uploading breaks.

I fixed this using some clever shell scripting and signal-passing. I have an arduinoconsole script (that you can pass the port number to open - pass 0 for /dev/ttyACM0) that opens up the serial console, and when the console terminates, it is restarted when you press enter, or a proper signal is received.

The other side of this is the Makefile I'm using, which kills the serial console before uploading and sends the restart signal after uploading. This means that usually the serial console is already open again before I switch to it (or, I can switch to it while still uploading and I'll know uploading is done because my serial console opens again).

For convenience, I pushed my scripts to a github repository, which makes it easy to keep them up-to-date too:

• arduinoconsole
• Makefile