17/10/2022, 15:30 Serial Bluetooth Terminal With Python Asyncio | Avil Page

Serial Bluetooth Terminal With Python Asyncio

Chillar Anand
— 2020-08-31

Introduction
PySerial package provides a tool called miniterm1, which provides a terminal to interact
with any serial ports.

However miniterm sends each and every character as we type instead of sending entire
message at once. In addition to this, it doesn't provide any timestamps on the messages
transferred.

In this article, lets write a simple terminal to address the above issues.

Bluetooth Receiver
pyserial-asyncio2 package provides Async I/O interface for communicating with serial
ports. We can write a simple function to read and print all the messages being received on
a serial port as follows.

import sys
import asyncio

import datetime as dt

import serial_asyncio

async def receive(reader):

while True:

data = await reader.readuntil(b'\n')

now = str(dt.datetime.now())

print(f'{now} Rx <== {data.strip().decode()}')

async def main(port, baudrate):

reader, _ = await serial_asyncio.open_serial_connection(url=port,

baudrate=baudrate)

receiver = receive(reader)

await asyncio.wait([receiver])

port = sys.argv[1]

baudrate = sys.argv[2]

loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()

loop.run_until_complete(main(port, baudrate))

loop.close()

Now we can connect a phone's bluetooth to a laptop bluetooth. From phone we can send
messages to laptop using bluetooth terminal app like Serial bluetooth terminal4.

Here a screenshot of messages being send from an Android device.

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17/10/2022, 15:30 Serial Bluetooth Terminal With Python Asyncio | Avil Page

We can listen to these messages on laptop via serial port by running the following
command.

$ python receiver.py /dev/cu.Bluetooth-Incoming-Port 9600

2020-08-31 10:44:50.995281 Rx <== ping from android

2020-08-31 10:44:57.702866 Rx <== test message

Bluetooth Sender
Now lets write a sender to send messages typed on the terminal to the bluetooth.

To read input from terminal, we need to use aioconsole 3. It provides async input
equivalent function to read input typed on the terminal.

import sys
import asyncio

import datetime as dt

import serial_asyncio

import aioconsole

async def send(writer):

stdin, stdout = await aioconsole.get_standard_streams()

async for line in stdin:

data = line.strip()

if not data:

continue

now = str(dt.datetime.now())

print(f'{now} Tx ==> {data.decode()}')

writer.write(line)

async def main(port, baudrate):

_, writer = await serial_asyncio.open_serial_connection(url=port,

baudrate=baudrate)

sender = send(writer)

await asyncio.wait([sender])

port = sys.argv[1]

baudrate = sys.argv[2]

loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()

loop.run_until_complete(main(port, baudrate))

loop.close()

We can run the program with the following command and send messages to phone's
bluetooth.

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17/10/2022, 15:30 Serial Bluetooth Terminal With Python Asyncio | Avil Page

$ python sender.py /dev/cu.Bluetooth-Incoming-Port 9600

ping from mac

2020-08-31 10:46:52.222676 Tx ==> ping from mac

2020-08-31 10:46:58.423492 Tx ==> test message

Here a screenshot of messages received on Android device.

Conclusion
If we combine the above two programmes, we get a simple bluetooth client to interact
with any bluetooth via serial interface. Here is the complete code 5 for the client.

In the next article, lets see how to interact with Bluetooth LE devices.

1. miniterm ↩

2. pyserial-asyncio on PyPi ↩

3. aioconsole on PyPi ↩

4. Serial Bluetooth Terminal on Play Store ↩

5. Python async client ↩

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