Since it is now for longer time possible to have multiple microcontroller in use, the UART monitor might be more intuitive as a connectable component similar to the Logic Analyzer or the Scope. IMHO, this might be more intuitive and more consistent with the present way of metering / analysing.
The Serial Monitor is kind of a debugging tool for the simulator.
It shows actual input and output for a serial device.
It could happen, for example that one device is sending but the other device is not receiving, or is receiving wrong data.
So I find useful having a monitor per device.
Having another device that can "sniff" or analyze the trafic (connected to transmission lines) would be useful as well.
For an outlook, it would be great to have a generic "interface decoder" (TWI, SPI, UART, WIFI...). Or alternatively / additionally a possibility to use available open source tools like sigrok pulseview:
https://sigrok.org/wiki/Protocol_decoders
pulseview looks very nice, this kind of graphics can be very useful:
One interesting possibility would be having those decoders (and graphics) integrated in Logic Analizer.
Interfacing to external software always have the challenge of dealing with dependencies, learning the API and integrate it in simulide.
It is also redundant, because those decoders are already implemented in simulide.
Maybe it is easier to add that functionality to the current implementations of the protocols in simulide and integrate in the Logic Analizer or create a Logic Analizer variant especially for this purpose.
On the other hand, using an external decoder could be useful to debug simulide's implementations of the protocols...
In any case it is a great idea.
I will think about how to implement it.
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