Opening a USB Serial Terminal

Note

Jupyter has a built-in terminal that you can access through your browser inside the Jupyter environment. We recommend you use this terminal. If you can’t access The Jupyter terminal, you can open a terminal using a USB cable to your board.

If you need to access a terminal, you can connect the micro-USB cable from your computer to the board and open a terminal. You can use the terminal to check the network connection of the board. You will need to have terminal emulator software installed on your computer. PuTTY is one application that can be used, and is available for free on Windows. To open a terminal, you will need to know the COM port for the board.

Windows

On Windows, you can find this in the Windows Device Manager in the control panel.

  1. Open the Device Manager, expand the Ports menu
  2. Find the COM port for the USB Serial Port. e.g. COM5
  3. Open PuTTY

Once PuTTY is open, enter the following settings:

  1. Select serial
  2. Enter the COM port number
  3. Enter the serial terminal settings (below)
  4. Click Open

Full terminal Settings:

  • 115200 baud
  • 8 data bits
  • 1 stop bit
  • No Parity
  • No Flow Control

Linux/Mac

Open a Terminal window on MacOS or an XTerm (or your favorite terminal program) on Linux.

Issue the following command to view current serial devices.

ls /dev/cu.usb*

Connect a Micro USB cable to the board and your computer.

Issue the following command again to identify the device.

ls /dev/cu.usb*

Identify the change of items in the list, and issue the following command:

screen /dev/<device> 115200 -L

For example, if the difference was cu.usbmodem0004, the command would be:

screen /dev/cu.usbmodem0004 115200 -L

Using the terminal

Hit Enter in the terminal window to make sure you can see the command prompt:

xilinx@pynq:/home/xilinx#

You can then run the same commands listed above to change the hostname, or configure a proxy.

You can also check the hostname of the board by running the hostname command:

hostname

You can also check the IP address of the board using the ip command:

ip a