Let AI agents interact with serial devices — list ports, connect, send, and read.
Let AI agents interact with serial devices — list ports, connect, send, and read. That is what the serial mcp server brings to an AI assistant: the same capability, reachable through the Model Context Protocol rather than a separate app or dashboard.
A stateful serial port Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for developer tooling and AI agents. Works out of the box with Claude Code, VS Code with Copilot, and any MCP-compatible runtime. Communicates over stdio and uses pyserial for cross-platform serial on macOS, Windows, and Linux.
Installation goes through your MCP client rather than a global install: point it at @modelcontextprotocol/inspector on npm and it is fetched when the client starts. The copy-paste blocks for Claude Desktop, Claude Code and Cursor are further down this page.
The server publishes 5 tools. What each one is for:
Category — ToolsIntrospection — serial.connections.listTracing — serial.trace.status, serial.trace.tailPlugins — serial.plugin.template, serial.plugin.list, serial.plugin.reload, serial.plugin.loadDemo — Video walkthrough — connecting to a serial device, sending commands, reading responses, and creatingConfiguration is passed through the environment: SERIAL_MCP_PLUGINS, SERIAL_MCP_TOOL_SEPARATOR. Treat anything key-shaped as a real credential — scope it to the minimum the server needs, and rotate it if it ever lands in a shared config.
Plenty of developer tooling servers cover similar ground. The differences that matter in practice are scope of access and how much setup stands between you and a working tool call. Serial's toolset — Category, Introspection, Tracing and 2 more — is a fair guide to whether it matches your workflow. It is maintained by es617; worth a glance at recent repository activity before you build anything load-bearing on it.
SyncDev reviews every entry in this directory against the project's own documentation before publishing, and revisits them as servers change.
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
| Category | Tools |
| Introspection | serial.connections.list |
| Tracing | serial.trace.status, serial.trace.tail |
| Plugins | serial.plugin.template, serial.plugin.list, serial.plugin.reload, serial.plugin.load |
| Demo | [Video walkthrough](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdFdXjoyyAM) — connecting to a serial device, sending commands, reading responses, and creating plugins. |
{
"mcpServers": {
"serial": {
"command": "npx",
"args": ["-y", "@modelcontextprotocol/inspector"],
"env": {
"SERIAL_MCP_PLUGINS": "your-value",
"SERIAL_MCP_TOOL_SEPARATOR": "your-value"
}
}
}
}Add to claude_desktop_config.json, then restart Claude Desktop.
| Variable | Description | Required |
|---|---|---|
| SERIAL_MCP_PLUGINS | Configuration value read at startup. | Optional |
| SERIAL_MCP_TOOL_SEPARATOR | Configuration value read at startup. | Optional |
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