Debug Serial Usage

The nRF9160 Feather comes with an on-board Silicon Labs CP2102 USB-to-UART chip. You can use it with most serial terminal viewers. If you have an older version of Windows you will have to install the driver. The download is located here.

Here's some recommendations for software to communicate with the nRF9160 Feather. No matter what program you use, the standard baud rate for the console is 115200. All other options are standard/default (8 bits, oon-pairty, 1 stop bit).

Multi-Platform

CoolTerm

CoolTerm has been my go-to for testing and debugging. Fortunately it's also multi-platform! You can download it by going here: https://www.freeware.the-meiers.org

Mac OSX & Linux

screen

You can use screen to view your debug output. Here's a typical command:

screen /dev/tty.SLAB_USBtoUART 115200

The major drawback of using screen is that it does not save your history. It's better to use other utilities for that purpose.

Note: depending on your system your serial port may be named something different from /dev/tty.SLAB_USBtoUART. You can check your dev folder like this to check which one may be it:

ls -l /dev | grep SLAB

cu

You can also use cu to display your debug output. Here's an example:

sudo cu -l /dev/tty.SLAB_USBtoUART -s 115200

If you notice, it requires super user permissions. (This is the only drawback to it IMHO)

To escape from your session type ~.