Arduino Serial Input Software And Displayed
Arduino Serial Input Serial Port Of
Arduino Serial Input How To Get Started

Arduino Serial Input How To Get Started

Once the coding is finished one can verify and upload the code to the arduino board as explained in the project how to get started with the arduino.

There are few communication methods where the user and microcontroller can have a two-way communication using a single device or medium.

Arduino Serial Input Serial Port Of

The serial port of the microcontroller provides the easiest way by which the user and the microcontroller can write their data in the same medium and both can read each others data.

Arduino Serial Input Software And Displayed

When the serial port of the microcontroller is connected to the PC and the incoming and outgoing data is monitored using software and displayed in a window, it forms the simplest text user interface (TUI) setup for the microcontroller.

In such a system the user can send the data from the PC to the microcontrollers serial port using software running in the PC, and can view the data which is send to the PC by the microcontroller in the same software.

The microcontroller should have the capability to read the data send by the PC and send the data back to the PC.

Normally the coding for enabling the serial data read and write in a microcontroller is difficult since the one who programs should have gone through all the register details of the microcontroller.

Being an easy prototyping platform the arduino has built-in functions for accessing the serial port and hence there is no need to go to the register details.

There are so many functions to send and receive data with and without formatting them in such a way to display in a serial monitoring software window.

This project demonstrates a simple program which can be used to receive an ASCII character send by the HyperTerminal of the PC and send the same data back to the PC.

The arduino board used in this project is the arduino pro-mini board and the IDE version of the arduino is 1.0.3 for windows.

The image of the arduino pro-mini board and the arduino IDE are shown below.

This hardware helps in programming the arduino board and also helps in the serial communication with the USB port of the PC.

The functions like Serial.begin(),Serial.print() and Serial.println() were used in that project.

It serves the purpose of waiting till the data byte reception is complete so that there should not be any error in reading the data byte.

It can return the data byte which can then be stored in a variable or used for some condition check etc.

The following statement shows how the data byte is read from the serial port and is stored into a variable.

The statement reads the data byte and stores the data byte to a variable var.

Unlike actually printing the data value in the serial port by sending the data byte after formatting it as ASCII character as the functions Serial.print() and Serial.println() does, the function Serial.write() simply sends the data byte to the serial port.

For example the statement given below will print the character A in the serial monitor software.

Suppose if one use the value 10 as the parameter of the function Serial.write() then it wont display anything in the serial monitor software since there is no displayable ASCII character of the value 10, but if the same parameter 10 is used with the function Serial.print() as shown in the following statement will print 10 in the serial port.

The code also blinks an LED each time it transmits a data to the serial port using the functions pinMode (), digitalWrite () and delay().

The details of those functions are already discussed in the previous project on How to use digital input and digital output of the arduino board.