Serial Studio and LTE modem HUAWEI K5161H

Overview

This project shows how to use Serial Studio to visualize signal quality data from a HUAWEI K5161H LTE modem.

Three methods of sending data are described:

Virtual Serial Port
MQTT
UDP Socket

The examples were built on Arch Linux, where you can:

Run Serial Studio from AppImage.
Install it from the Arch User Repository (AUR) manually or with an AUR helper like yay:
```
yay -S serial-studio-bin
```
Build it with cmake.

Data from the HUAWEI K5161H is pulled from the URL API http://192.168.9.1/api/device/signal. Python is used to receive, process, and generate data frames. All three scripts read the API with the requests library:

sudo pacman -S python-requests

Each frame carries five values, matching the datasets in LTE Modem.ssproj: cell ID, RSRQ (dB), RSRP (dBm), RSSI (dBm), and SINR (dB). The serial and UDP scripts wrap each frame in the project's /* and */ start and end sequences.

Method 1: Virtual serial port

Create a virtual serial port

Install socat:
```
sudo pacman -S socat
```
Create a linked pair of virtual serial ports, ttyV0 for listening and ttyV1 for sending data:
```
socat -d -d pty,rawer,echo=0,link=/tmp/ttyV0,b9600 pty,rawer,echo=0,link=/tmp/ttyV1,b9600
```
Test the virtual serial ports by reading from /tmp/ttyV0:
```
cat /tmp/ttyV0
```
and writing data to /tmp/ttyV1:
```
echo 100 > /tmp/ttyV1
```
Install python-pyserial:
```
sudo pacman -S python-pyserial
```
Run the Python script lte_serial.py to process data and send it to /tmp/ttyV1:
```
python lte_serial.py
```

Serial Studio configuration for the virtual serial port

Run Serial Studio.
Go to DEVICE SETUP → I/O Interface: Serial Port.
Go to FRAME PARSING → Parse via Project File.
Pick Project file → LTE Modem.ssproj.
Manually enter COM Port → /tmp/ttyV0 and press Enter.
Pick Baud Rate → 9600.
Click Connect in the upper right corner.

After the first frame of data arrives, Serial Studio opens the dashboard with plots automatically.

Method 2: MQTT

Set up the MQTT broker

Install the MQTT broker Mosquitto:
```
sudo pacman -S mosquitto
```
Run the MQTT broker with default settings:
```
mosquitto --verbose
```

Test the broker by sending data:

mosquitto_pub -m "abcd,100,50,75,89" -t "lte"

Install the Python MQTT client library, paho:
```
sudo pacman -S python-paho-mqtt
```
Run the Python script lte_mqtt.py to process data and send it to the broker:
```
python lte_mqtt.py
```

Serial Studio configuration for MQTT

Run Serial Studio.
Go to FRAME PARSING → Parse via Project File.
Pick Project file → LTE Modem.ssproj.
Click MQTT in the top bar.
Set Host → 127.0.0.1.
Set Port → 1883.
Set Topic → lte.
Pick Mode → Subscriber.
Set Keep Alive → 600.
Click Connect.

After the first frame of data arrives, Serial Studio opens the dashboard with plots automatically.

Method 3: UDP socket

The UDP socket approach is simpler than the others.

Run the Python script lte_udp.py to process data and send it to the UDP socket:

python lte_udp.py

Serial Studio configuration for UDP socket

Run Serial Studio.
Go to DEVICE SETUP → I/O Interface: Network Socket.
Go to FRAME PARSING → Parse via Project File.
Pick Project file → LTE Modem.ssproj.
Pick Socket type → UDP.
Set Remote address → 127.0.0.1.
Set Local port → 5005.
Click Connect in the upper right corner.

After the first frame of data arrives, Serial Studio opens the dashboard with plots automatically.