Introduction: How to Create Interactive Terminal for Your Arduino Robot Projects?

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If you ever wondered, is it possible to create an interactive terminal for your Arduino projects, instead of the good old Serial Monitor, the answer is yes!

This short tutorial is all about creating an interactive terminal in the Arduino environment. It can be very useful if you want to create a robot, and you want to control it remotely. Or if you need to create a data logging IOT device in a distant place, where you can't reach it easily. Also, the output will look much cooler, and you can interact with it like a terminal-ninja.

Supplies

I have used an old ESP32 NodeMCU board, a servo and an LED. The connection diagram shown above. The servo is connected to GPIO-33 and the LED is connected to GPIO-32( please use a 1K resistor in series with the LED ).

The libraries used in this tutorial are a bit memory hungry. Because of this, we need a board with more RAM memory than the Arduino UNO. The ESP32 and the ESP8266 are great for this job. Also, you can use the UNO, but your main program will be limited very easily by the 2k-bytes of RAM which the UNO has. 

Step 1: Complete the Video Tutorial

I think it is easier to follow a video. In the video, everything is explained. You can create an interactive terminal from the ground up.

I hope this tutorial will be useful for your next projects and you can create awesome things with it :)