JIYIK CN >

This tutorial will discuss printing text or variables on the console using the Arduino IDE's serial monitor.

Arduino using the serial monitor to print to the console

The Arduino IDE has a console at the bottom, but we cannot print anything on it. The console is only used to display information during code verification and compilation.

The console displays the memory usage of the code in bytes and errors when verifying or uploading the code. To print or display the values ​​stored in the variables, we can use the serial monitor of the Arduino IDE.

We can launch the serial monitor using the Serial tab on the Arduino IDE toolbar Tools. We can Serial.begin()start serial at a specific baud rate or speed using the Serial function.

We can use the Serial.print()and Serial.println()functions to print text and variables on the serial monitor.

The difference between these two functions is that print()the function prints the variable and the cursor remains on the same line, but in println()case of the function the cursor moves to the next line after printing the variable.

For example, suppose we want to print two variables on the same line and the third variable on the next line. In this case, we would use print()the function to print the first variable, then use println()the function to print the second variable and move the cursor to the next line, then use print()the function again to print the third variable.

If we only want to print the variable once on the serial monitor, we can use the setup()print() function inside the Serial Monitor function Serial.print()as it only runs once when the Arduino board is turned on.

If we want to print a variable continuously, we have to loop()print it inside a function because the code inside the loop function runs in a loop whenever the Arduino is turned on. We can print variables of all data types using the serial monitor.

For example, let's define some variables and print them on the serial monitor. See the code below.

int My_Int = 10;
unsigned long My_TimeStamp = 1416803716;
const char *My_CharArray = {"This is My_CharArray"};
float My_Float = 3.14159266759;

void setup() {
  Serial.begin(9600);
  Serial.println(My_Int);
  Serial.println(My_TimeStamp);
  Serial.println(My_CharArray);
  Serial.print(My_Float, 5);  // prints to five places right of the decimal
}
void loop() {}

Note that we can only run the serial monitor when the Arduino board is connected with the Arduino IDE. We can also Serial.print()define a second parameter in the function, which is the format in which the variable value will be printed.

For example, in case of integer or long data type, we can define the number system we want to display like binary BINand decimal DEC. By default, numbers will be displayed in decimal number system.

For floating point numbers we can define the number of decimal places of the number to be printed on the serial monitor. Check this link for Serial.print()more details about the function.

Serial.print()The data in the function will be converted to ASCII representation. If we want to send data as a byte stream, we can use Serial.write()the function instead of Serial.print()the function.

Check this link for Serial.write()more details on the function.