Tag: SoftwareSerial

One Line Only

October 30, 2021 / nebel / 3 Comments

The featured image of this post is by Vladimir163rus on Pixabay.

A new Arduino library has seen the light of day: SingleWireSerial. It supports single-wire, asynchronous serial, half-duplex communication. By using the input capture feature of the AVR MCUs, it is extremely accurate and supports bit rates up to 250 kbps robustly. And contrary to its title, one can even use it in a two-wire setting.

Communicating Asynchronously

October 26, 2021 / nebel / 1 Comment

The featured image of this post is by dooder – de.freepik.com

Serial asynchronous communication is one of the most common forms of communication between two electronic devices. Let us see, what Arduino libraries are there to support it, and let us check, how well they perform.

Is any Input Available?

October 21, 2021 / nebel / 3 Comments

The featured image of this post is by rawpixel.com – de.freepik.com

The SoftwareSerial class has the available() method, which returns the number of characters that have been already received but not yet read. This is very similar to what the standard Serial.available() method offers. There is an interesting difference, though. A call to SoftwareSerial.available() is significantly slower than a call to Serial.available(). We will look for the deeper reason for this strange behavior and I will show you three ways how to fix it.

EDIT: The problem will vanish with Arduino version 1.8.17

Debugging(4): Stub it out!

July 22, 2021 / nebel / 0 Comments

The featured image is by Hebi B. on Pixabay

How can you use a stub in order to squash your software bugs? This blog post shows how to arrive in 7 easy steps at a working debugging solution using a gdb-stub for some 8-bit AVR MCUs. The only additional hardware you need is an ISP programmer in order to burn a new bootloader (well, if you are satisfied with a very slow-running program, you do not even need this).

Debugging(3): Debugging is Like Being the Detective in a Crime Movie Where You are Also the Murderer

July 19, 2021 / nebel / 0 Comments

Featured picture: OpenClipart-Vectors on Pixabay.

One has to add to the title (quoted from a tweet by Filipe Fortes) that the detective suffers from memory loss. Otherwise, the case could be solved easily. Similarly, with debugging: If I only knew what nasty things I have hidden in the source code, I could just remove them – but I simply do not know. In this blog post, we will have a look at what kind of tools one could use to find the skeletons hidden in the closet.