USB and Serial Communication - Exploring Arduino: Tools and Techniques for Engineering Wizardry - page 108

CODE AND DIGITAL CONTENT FOR THIS CHAPTER
Code downloads, video, and other digital content for this chapter can be found at
www.exploringarduino.com/content/ch6 .
In addition, all code can be found at www.wiley.com/go/exploringarduino on
the Download Code tab. The code is in the chapter 06 download and individu-
ally named according to the names throughout the chapter.
Perhaps the most important part of any Arduino is its capability to be pro-
grammed directly via a USB serial port. This feature enables you to program the
Arduino without any special hardware, such as an AVR ISP MKII. Ordinarily,
microcontrollers rely on a dedicated piece of external hardware (such as the
MKII) to serve as a programmer that connects between your computer and the
microcontroller you are trying to program. In the case of the Arduino, this pro-
grammer is essentially built into the board, instead of being a piece of external
hardware. What's more, this gives you a direct connection to the ATMega's
integrated Universal Synchronous/Asynchronous Receiver and Transmitter
(USART). Using this interface, you can send information between your host
computer and the Arduino, or between the Arduino and other serial-enabled
components (including other Arduinos).
This chapter covers just about everything you could want to know about con-
necting an Arduino to your computer via USB and transmitting data between
the two. Different Arduinos have different serial capabilities, so this chapter
covers each of them, and you build sample projects with each serial commu-
nication technology to get yourself acquainted with how to take advantage of
them as best as possible. Note that, as a result of this, the parts list includes
several types of Arduinos. Depending on which Arduino you are trying to
learn about, you can pick and choose which sections to read, which examples
to explore, and which parts from the parts list you actually need for your
Arduino explorations.
UnderstandingtheArduino'sSerialCommunication
Capabilities
As already alluded to in the introduction to this chapter, the different Arduino
boards offer lots of different serial implementations, both in terms of how the
hardware implements the USB-to-serial adapters and in terms of the software
support for various features. First, in this section, you learn about the various
serial communication hardware interfaces offered on different Arduino boards.