Feasibility of Kindle as a Serial Terminal?

[bax21]

Given that a Kindle touch has a serial port, is it possible to use it to talk to a microcontroller?

[geekmaster]

Originally Posted by bax21

Given that a Kindle touch has a serial port, is it possible to use it to talk to a microcontroller?

Yes. It has been done since the Kindle 1 days...

[bax21]

What I am talking about here is a Kindle analog of something like TeraTerm or Putty for the PC that will talk on the serial COM port (Kindle serial port) to a microcontroller TTL uart (e.g. send and receive characters). I have searched the forum and found numerous terminal references, but it seems that these do not have anything to do with the serial port and are more like the Windows commandline interface.

I am a rank beginner and somewhat overwhelmed with the knowledge base of the Forum. Pehaps I should re-phrase my question; what can you do with the Kindle serial port? Previously, I was looking at Android tablets for this functionality. Google Play has an APP called, "Slick 2 USB Serial Terminal",

https://play.google.com/store/apps/d...rialterm&hl=en

This App requires USB host to interface with a USB to serial adapter. I could not get it to work with a FTDI adapter after trying it on three different tablets that presumably had USB host capability. I didn't realize that Kindle had a serial port until I accidentally turned up a reference to it on this forum. I have found pinouts to the port, but no explicit references to it takling to the ouside world. Any links would be greatly appreciated.

[knc1]

Originally Posted by bax21

I didn't realize that Kindle had a serial port until I accidentally turned up a reference to it on this forum. I have found pinouts to the port, but no explicit references to it takling to the ouside world. Any links would be greatly appreciated.

One good place to stumble on serial port information is here:
https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Hard...ex#Serial_Port

The Kindles run Linux, and a character stream device is just a character stream device.

The hardware's primary serial port (the ones described at above link) begin life during the boot sequence as /dev/console.

During the boot sequence the console device will (usually) be re-assigned.
Do:
cat /proc/cmdline
and you should find a: console= command line option.
That assigned device name is that hardware serial port after the kernel boot up completes.

Just open/read/write/flush/close like any other character device.
Which is why you don't find many references, it is just a bit of "basic" knowledge in how Linux works.

[bax21]

Thank you for your repies...

I am rethinking this whole endeavor and it may be beyond my capabilities. I am fluent in C# and visual Basic, but a real noob when it comes to Linux. Say I were to purchase a refurb Kindle Touch (with special offers) from Amazon, what would be the steps to get at the underlying Linux and start putting characters out the port? Would I first start here,

https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kind...eak.mp3_method

and use the data.tar.gz method?

[geekmaster]

I think the optware collection has minicom or a similar terminal program. A static build may not even need optware to run on the kindle. In the "olden days" a terminal program (talking directly to the UART) was typically one of the FIRST things you wrote after hello.c (at least for people I hung out with).