Send and read serial commands from terminal

Question

I have a very limited list of software that I can install on an (IOT edge) device. I have minicom and chat commands (in addition to standard commands like echo and cat), and need to write to a serial device a command and read the response.

The device in question is a modem, and I need to run AT commands on it. If using minicom and setting up the menu etc. I can run these commands normally, and get the output. The problem is that I have around a thousand of these devices, so setup and data logging needs to be automated.

So within these parameters is there a way to run minicom and capture the output without any interactive elements? I have tried

minicom -S scriptfile -C outfile

where scriptfile (for now) contains following:

sleep 1
send "AT"

This seems to ignore the sleep command, and outfile is created, but is left empty. Also what would I need to add to the command that it wouldn't open a session or interactive element?

Answer 1

So within these parameters is there a way to run minicom and capture the output without any interactive elements?

I am not sure about minicom, but I have a better tool for this job which was written specifically for the purpose to being able to run AT commands non-interactive from the command line with capture capabilities: atinout.

You can automate this in any way you like, for instance

for device in mydevice0001 mydevice0002 ... mydevice1000
do
    atinout my_at_commands.txt /dev/$device capture-$device.txt
done