USB-serial with PuTTY

PuTTY is a terminal emulator that also works well for serial port connections. Currently, PuTTY can’t do file transfer over serial links with XMODEM, YMODEM, or ZMODEM. To do file transfer over serial links, use minicom.

PuTTY is available on Linux like:

apt install putty

macOS PuTTY install

On macOS, PuTTY is obtained by:

brew install putty

If PuTTY doesn’t link on macOS due to “pterm” name conflict, create an alias by finding the putty binary like:

alias putty="$(brew --prefix putty)/bin/putty"

Windows PuTTY install

On Windows, putty can be installed with winget:

winget install PuTTY.PuTTY

PuTTY connection

Start PuTTY in Terminal command line or from the Windows Start Menu.

putty

which opens the PuTTY GUI.

Select the serial line (say /dev/ttyUSB0 for Linux, COM5 for Windows) and baud rate (say 115200).

Determine the serial port of a USB-serial adapter like:

• Linux: ls /dev/ttyUSB*
• macOS: ls /dev/tty.usbserial*