The Serial Monitor Options Button

This section describes the menu items of the options button  Serial Monitor Options Button  found in the serial Monitor window.

To learn more about the Serial Monitor window, read here.

Serial Monitor Options Menu
The Serial Monitor Options menu

 

1 Start and Pause
Freezes the inbound data area of the Serial Monitor so that incoming data does not show up any more. Helpful to stop received text from scrolling out of the window while the sketch keeps sending more data.
To continue and unfreeze the inbound area, use the "Start" menu item.

Warning 16 Note:

If you have paused the Serial Monitor with this "Pause" function and the sketch has halted in a breakpoint in the meantime, then you can choose "Start", but since Visual Micro had no connection with the board in between, it cannot "know" that the sketch is halted in a breakpoint. If you press [F5] then, Visual Micro wants to stop the sketch and rebuild it.
In this case you can manually continue the sketch execution by sending a lower case "c" (for continue) to the board using the Serial Monitors outbound window and the Send button. The next time the board halts in a breakpoint, [F5] acts as expected again.

2 Stop
Closes the Serial Monitor and interrupts communication between board and PC. The sketch continues to run until it hits a breakpoint, then it stops. To restart the sketch (to "boot" your board), reopen the Serial Monitor window.
3 Settings
This menu item contains a single submenu item "Discard inbound when sending". You can enable and disable this setting by selecting the submenu item.
If "Discard inbound when sending" is selected, then inbound data is discarded by Visual Micro while sending data to the board. Enable this function if large amounts of data are constantly sent from the board to the PC to ensure that data being sent to the board reaches the board correctly.
4 Breakpoint Manager
"Jump to breakpoints": If this option is selected, Visual Micro will jump to the source code line of a breakpoint when this breakpoint is hit and code execution is stopped.

"Jump to trace points": If this option is selected, Visual Micro will jump to the source code line of a breakpoint even if Visual Micro is configured so that code is not stopping there (e.g. by "Auto continue" below). This is useful to see the code executing in a "live" manner.

"Auto continue": If enabled, breakpoints will not halt the execution of the sketch, but the sketch will continue execution if a breakpoint is hit. However, you will be able to follow the flow of execution by watching the Output Window.

Note Icon Note:

In conjunction with "Jump to breakpoints" or "Jump to tracepoints" enabled, you can follow the flow of execution in your source code, as every breakpoint hit will be shown in the source window.

"Disable all breakpoints": This will disable all breakpoints in your sketch, so that nothing will show up in the Output Window and in the source code window.

Note Icon Note:

You can enable/disable breakpoints individually if you right click on the breakpoint icon in your source window Breakpoint Icon and select "Enable/Disable breakpoint". Both methods of disabling require rebuilding and uploading your sketch and can be selected at any time.

5 Other Windows
"Watch expression": This will open the Expression window.
Read here for a description of the Expression window.

"AGauge Example":  This setting is used to show/hide so the "Agauge" window, which acts as an example for so called Visualization Windows (read more).
6 Message Windows
Controls which window(s) will show messages from the board. All submenu items are on/off switches. "Messages" means information from breakpoints when using Breakpoint Action texts (also known as "When Hit" text) function.

"Serial": Messages will appear in the Serial Monitor window

"Message": Messages will appear in the "Micro Debug Message" portion of the Output Window.

"Trace": Messages will appear in the "Micro Debug Trace" portion of the Output Window.
7 Running Visualizations
This submenu lists all running visualization. By checking/unchecking the menu items, you can show or hide these windows.
((Read more about visualization)