Serial communication using Arduino

If you’re working with the Arduino Uno , you’ll be using a single serial communication port that connects through the USB-A cable.
This port is actually hooked up to pins zero and one on the board.
What’s cool about the Arduino Uno is that it can communicate with your PC using this one hardware serial port.
Now, if you happen to have the Arduino Mega , you’re in luck because it has a whopping four serial communication ports ! The TX0 and RX0 ports on the Mega connect to the USB, plus there are three more ports labeled TX1 to TX3 .
But for now, let’s focus on how to set up serial communication specifically for the Arduino Uno ..

Getting started with serial communication is pretty straightforward! First, you just need to call ‘begin’ and set your baud rate—most folks go with 9600 or 115200.
It’s a good idea to chill for a moment until the connection is up and running; you can do this by using a wire loop with ‘Serial’ to check if everything’s good.
Once you’re connected, you can shoot messages like ‘Hello, World’ from your Arduino to your PC, but don’t forget to check the input on the serial monitor to make sure it’s coming through right.
If the baud rate isn’t set up correctly, your text might start looking like gobbled nonsense, so double-check that setting! And remember, using methods like ‘Serial.print’ and ‘Serial.println’ will change how your messages appear when they’re split across multiple lines..

When you enable the timestamp option, you can actually see when your data was received, but you have the freedom to turn it off later if you want.
Just remember, sending a command doesn’t always guarantee that the data sent is the same as what you receive; that’s because it passes through an extra buffer .
Data only gets sent when everything’s set right in your environment, so it’s a good idea to double-check that the data has actually been sent before firing off your next command.
Also, don’t skip out on flushing the serial—it’s crucial to make sure that the sending byte buffer is totally empty before you move on to the next task..

When you’re working with Arduino and your PC, you might notice that there can be some empty spots in the buffer.
You can keep an eye on these gaps by using a ‘while’ statement to check for any empty spaces in the sending buffer.
If there are no empty spaces, you’ll run into an infinite loop, which is something you definitely want to avoid.
But if there’s at least one open spot, the loop will break, letting you send your data smoothly.
Plus, data can flow back from the PC to the Arduino too! You can monitor this using an ‘if’ statement that checks the Serial value for incoming data bytes.
And don’t forget, with the Serial library, reading bytes from the serial buffer is as easy as pie using the Serial.read function.
Once you’ve read the data, you can show the new value with Serial.print().
Just type ‘R’ and hit enter, and voilà—you’ve successfully sent that character to your serial monitor, confirming everything’s working like it should!.

In the world of Arduino, when it gets a character byte like ‘a’ from your PC, it just can’t help but send it right back! You can totally choose how you want to format your values using serial.println, whether it’s in decimal or hexadecimal.
For instance, when you send the uppercase ‘M’, it has a special Unicode equivalent and a decimal value of 77 (which is 4D in hex!).
This session was all about the ins and outs of sending and receiving data through serial communication.
And guess what? In the next session, we’ll dive into how to debug Arduino using this cool method..