When connected to USB and unlocked, the Playdate provides a serial interface over USB. Commands are sent as ascii and must end in a newline character (\n). If the currently running game logs something to the console (e.g. via print() in Lua, or playdate->system->logToConsole in C) this will also be sent via serial output. Some commands (such as button or stream enable) will cause the Playdate to continually send data until another command is sent to cancel it, other commands (for example, bitmap) may require extra binary data to be sent after the newline character.
Some of these commands are used by Playdate Simulator for features like "preview bitmap" or "run pdx", or to enable streaming in Playdate mirror. If you want to play around with these, and you use a browser that supports WebSerial, you should check out my pd-usb library.
| USB Vendor ID | 0x1331 |
| USB Product ID | 0x5740 |
| Baud rate | 115200 |
You can use any terminal emulator to connect to the virtual serial port. For example, on macOS, you can connect using picocom by running:
picocom -b 115200 -p n -d 8 --omap crcrlf /dev/cu.usbmodemPD<serial number>
When you're done, disconnect and quit picocom with CTRL-a CTRL-x
Running help will return a very helpful list of available commands:
The following commands are available:
Telnet commands:
help Displays all available commands or individual help on each command
CPU Control:
serialread Print the device serial number
trace trace_<delay>. (trace 10)
stoptrace stoptrace
bootdisk reboot into recovery segment USB disk
datadisk reboot into data segment USB disk
factoryreset factory reset
formatdata format data disk
settime sets the RTC. format is ISO8601 plus weekday (1=mon) e.g.: 2018-03-20T19:58:29Z 2
gettime reads the RTC
vbat get battery voltage
rawvbat get raw battery adc value
batpct get battery percentage
temp get estimated ambient temperature
dcache dcache <on/off>: turn dcache on or off
icache icache <on/off>: turn icache on or off
Runtime control:
echo echo (on|off): turn console echo on or off
buttons Test buttons & crank
tunebuttons tunebuttons <debounce> <holdoff>
btn btn <btn>: simulate a button press. +a/-a/a for down/up/both
changecrank changecrank +-<degrees>
dockcrank simulates crank docking
enablecrank Reenables crank updates
disablecrank Disables crank updates
accel simulate accelerometer change
screen Dump framebuffer data (400x240 bits)
bitmap Send bitmap to screen (followed by 400x240 bits)
controller start or stop controller mode
eval execute a compiled Lua function
run run <path to pdx>: Run the named program
luatrace Get a Lua stack trace
stats Display runtime stats
autolock autolock <always|onBattery>
version Display build target and SDK version
memstats memstats
hibernate hibernate
Stream:
stream stream <enable|disable|poke>
ESP functions:
espreset reset the ESP chip
espoff turn off the ESP
espbootlog get the ESP startup log
espfile espfile <path> <address> <md5> <uncompressed size>: add the given file to the upload list. If <uncompressed size> is added then the file is assumed to be compressed.
espflash espflash <baud> [0|1] send the files listed with the espfile command to the ESP flash.
espbaud espbaud <speed> [cts]
esp esp <cmd>: Forward a command to the ESP firmware, read until keypress
Firmware Update:
fwup fwup [bundle_path]
Secret commands:
formatboot
unlock
islocked
Most of these commands are self-explanatory, so I will just detail some of the interesting/different ones. Please note these were run on an older Playdate Developer Preview unit, so there may be some differences with the final units that get shipped to the public.
Example output:
~version:
target=DVT1
build=c4abdb37253e-1.7.0-release.127473-buildbot-20211215_200649
boot_build=c4abdb37253e-1.7.0-release.127473-buildbot
SDK=1.7.0
pdxversion=10500
serial#=<REDACTED>
cc=9.2.1 20191025 (release) [ARM/arm-9-branch revision 277599]
Example output:
~stats:
frame count: 194503
frame time: 0.000977
gc time: 0.016602
disp time: 18
current time: 9855691
mem alloced: 403288
mem reserved: 460448
mem total: 16645684
kernel: 0.1%
serial: 0.0%
game: 2.5%
GC: 35.2%
wifi: 0.0%
trace: 0.0%
audio: 0.2%
Begins button-testing mode causes the device to begin continually writing the current control state to USB bulk in, at approximately 50 times per second. This can be stopped by sending a newline to the device.
Each new state will be written as a single line with the following structure:
buttons:XX XX XX crank:X.X docked:X
button gives three hex-formatted numbers containing the current button state. The first number indicates which buttons are currently pressed, the second indicates which buttons were pressed after the last update, and the third indicates which buttons were released after the last update. These should be treated as bitflags:
| Button | Bitmask |
|---|---|
| a | 0x01 |
| b | 0x02 |
| up | 0x04 |
| down | 0x08 |
| left | 0x10 |
| right | 0x20 |
| menu | 0x40 |
| lock | 0x80 |
crank gives the crank angle as a floating point number, measured in degrees, with 0 being the 12 o'clock position.
docked will be 0 if the crank is not docked, or 1 if docked.
Gets the current screen buffer as a 1-bit array of pixels. The data returned from the Playdate will begin with an 11-byte string \r\nscreen~:\n, followed by 12000 bytes of bitmap data where each bit of every byte represents one pixel; 0 for black, 1 for white.
Sends a 1-bit bitmap to be previewed on the Playdate screen. The command must begin with a 7-byte command string bitmap\n, followed by 12000 bytes of bitmap data where each bit of every byte represents one pixel; 0 for black, 1 for white.
Launches a .pdx rom from the Playdate's data partition. The game path must begin with a forward slash, e.g run /System/Crayons.pdx.
Evaluates a compiled Lua function on the device. The command must begin with the string eval %d\n where %d is the length of the data to eval. This should then be followed by the data for a compiled Lua function. You can use the usbeval.py script in this repo's tools directory to play around with this.
Note: eval doesn't work in System apps (Launcher, Settings, etc) nor games purchased from the Catalog. You must remove hash from the purchased game in order to allow for eval.
This command will not work if the currently loaded game is from the System directory on the device, presumably for security reasons.
Used for interacting with the Playdate's video/audio streaming protocol, as used by Playdate Mirror.
Using the esp <cmd> command will forward an ESP-AT command to the ESP32 firmware. Please note that these commands can potentially be very dangerous and may even damage your Playdate, so only mess with this stuff if you're stupid (me) or know what you're doing (not me). In the event that you do goof something up, you may be able to recover by holding down the Playdate's secret power/reset button, which is hidden in the cavity where the crank handle goes when it's docked. Have paperclips on standby!
After sending an ESP-AT command, you need to continue reading from the device until you receive a line that contains OK or ERROR to get the full response.
I can't profess to be very experienced here, so I didn't poke to deeply. However here's the results of some of the commands I tried:
Version information:
AT version:2.0.0.0-dev(b6850a4 - Oct 24 2019 12:10:13)
SDK version:v3.3-beta3-170-g91f29bef17
compile time(e9c8abb):Dec 15 2021 20:08:07
Querying supported commands doesn't seem to be supported.
Current UART configuration:
+UART_CUR:2534653,8,1,0,3
Querying user partitions in ESP flash:
AT+SYSFLASH?
+SYSFLASH:"ble_data",64,1,0x21000,0x3000
+SYSFLASH:"server_cert",64,2,0x24000,0x2000
+SYSFLASH:"server_key",64,3,0x26000,0x2000
+SYSFLASH:"server_ca",64,4,0x28000,0x2000
+SYSFLASH:"client_cert",64,5,0x2a000,0x2000
+SYSFLASH:"client_key",64,6,0x2c000,0x2000
+SYSFLASH:"client_ca",64,7,0x2e000,0x2000
+SYSFLASH:"factory_param",64,8,0x30000,0x1000
+SYSFLASH:"wpa2_cert",64,9,0x31000,0x2000
+SYSFLASH:"wpa2_key",64,10,0x33000,0x2000
+SYSFLASH:"wpa2_ca",64,11,0x35000,0x2000
+SYSFLASH:"mqtt_cert",64,12,0x37000,0x2000
+SYSFLASH:"mqtt_key",64,13,0x39000,0x2000
+SYSFLASH:"mqtt_ca",64,14,0x3b000,0x2000
+SYSFLASH:"fatfs",1,129,0x70000,0x90000
Most partitions don't seem to be readable, however you can for example dump the client CA cert by doing AT+SYSFLASH=2,"client_ca",0,0x2000.
No file system commands seem to be supported.
The btn command can also send key presses and releases, which call the associated callbacks for the current game.
Most keys on the computer keyboard have a single-byte representation in the btn command. In the case of printable characters, this corresponds to their ASCII codepoint, but other keys like arrows and function keys also have a number used by the Simulator.
You can find a full set of the key codes used by the Simulator here.
For a key press event, send btn vK, where K is the key code byte.
For a key release event, send btn ^K, again where K is the key code byte.
Takes a 32 character unlock code and compares it to the device's unlock code.
If it matches, additional commands are enabled.
The unlock code is likely unique to each device, but, as of firmware 1.10, can be dumped from a game using:
SDFile* file = pd->file->open("unlockkey.txt", kFileWrite);
pd->file->write(file, (const char*)0x1FF0F040, 0x20);
pd->file->close(file);
Prints 1 if the serial console is locked, or 0 if the device successfully ran unlock.
- Added
rawvbatcommand
(these commands were observed in 1.12.3, but may have been introduced earlier)
- Added
factoryresetcommand - Added
tunebuttonscommand - Changed
autolockto remove never option.
- Added the
hibernatecommand. versionoutput:~version: target=DVT1 build=c4abdb37253e-1.7.0-release.127473-buildbot-20211215_200649 boot_build=c4abdb37253e-1.7.0-release.127473-buildbot SDK=1.7.0 pdxversion=10500 serial#=<REDACTED> cc=9.2.1 20191025 (release) [ARM/arm-9-branch revision 277599]
Initial version tested