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serialftp - A tiny library to transmit files over serial / UART

serialftp can be used as a way to carry out simple file transfer operations over a serial connection to a microcontroller's flash memory.

The aim of this project is not to have full-fledged access to any file system via a microcontroller, but to provide the bare minimum needed to get a file in or out.

For more advanced use cases other projects exist, such as:

A companion library written in Python is supplied in python/lib.

Examples

Arduino

#include <Arduino.h>
#include <serialftp.h>

SerialFTP sftp;

void setup() {
    Serial.begin();
    sftp.begin();
}

void loop() {
    sftp.run();
}

Python

import serialftp

s = serialftp.SerialFTP()

with open("/tmp/hello", "w") as f:
    f.write("Hello world!\n")

s.begin()
s.put("/tmp/hello", "hello")
s.get("hello", "/tmp/hello.read")
s.list_files()
s.rm("hello")
s.end()

Bash

./ls.py              # List root directory
./ls.py dir          # List 'dir'
./get.py file dest   # Copy remote 'file' to local 'dest'
./put.py file dest   # Copy local 'file' to remote 'dest'
./rm.py file         # Remove remote 'file'

Supported

Operations

  • ls
  • cd
  • get
  • put
  • rm

File systems

  • LittleFS

Hardware

serialftp is tested on

  • Raspberry Pi Pico / Pico W (earlephilhower/arduino-pico)

and only with small files (<1 kByte).

Limitations

  • Fixed begin / end special character sequences
  • Maximum file size is 4096 bytes (value of SERIALFTP_MAX_FILE_SIZE)
  • File names are limited to these characters: [a-z][A-Z][0-9]._-/
  • No empty directories (because of LittleFS)
  • run function is not very flexible
  • used serial port is Serial
  • cd does not support .. for entering the parent directory

Dependencies

  • Arduino framework
  • LittleFS

How it works

A special character sequence switches the microcontroller to "file transfer" mode and back.

While in file transfer mode, the operations listed above can be made. Each operation must be terminated with a trailing newline '\n'.

Operations, such as ls, get and rm produce human readable output and can be used directly from a terminal program.

For byte-correct I/O, the get and put operations should not be written by hand, but best used via the supplied python library or a similar tool.

Protocols

get

input : "get\n"
output: "BEGIN" SIZE DATA "XOR" CHECKSUM "EOF"

Quoted strings are transmitted verbatim.

SIZE is a 4-byte little-endian unsigned integer that contains the size of the following DATA array.

DATA is a sequence of single bytes. The sequence is SIZE bytes long.

CHECKSUM is an 8-bit XOR-checksum over the bytes in DATA.

put

input : "put" FILENAME "\n"
output: "OKGO"
input : DATA "\x04"
output: "Wrote " SIZE " bytes to file '" PATH "'"

FILENAME is the path and name of the file in the flash memory. In case FILENAME fails validation, instead of "OKGO", an error message is returned and the put operation is cancelled.

DATA is the content of the file to be written. DATA is followed by the EOT (end-of-transmission) character (0x04 or Ctrl-D).

SIZE is the size of the file content on flash memory.

PATH is the path, where the file is stored and can be accessed from.

PATH should be equal to FILENAME.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.

Authors:

  • Bastian Löher - Initial work