Serial Communication with Arduino - The details!

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Are you wondering what the heck serial communication is?

and they leave you wondering more about this serial communication thing – I mean, how does it actually work!?

In this lesson you will learn:

What is “serial communication”?
What is a USART anyway?
The nitty gritty of basic serial communication
The different roles of start bits, data frames, parity bits, and stop bits
What the heck baud rate it – and why it is SO crucial
The (lack of) significance of the baud rate 9600
DON’T GET SCARED!
OK – before we start, I want to warn you that this lesson is filled with technical terms, probably like 572 of them!

I know when you’re new to electronics, all this crazy sounding jargon can be confusing, and you might think it will all be way over your head.

And it might be all “over your head” for a while (it still might be over my head 😉 – but as you get more familiar with these terms, and see them used and explained in different ways, over time all the crazy stuff will start to sink in.

I’ll try to explain all the jargon along the way as best as I can, but just in case you miss something… here is a chart listing all the terms used here:

TERM DESCRIPTION
UART Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter
USART Universal Synchronous/Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter
SPI Serial Peripheral Interface
I2C Inter-Integrated Circuit
ATMEGA328P Microcontroller The primary microcontroller used On Arduino UNO and MEGA – has built-in UART
ATmega16U2 Microcontroller A microcontroller used on the Arduino UNO and MEGA that has a built in USART. This microcontroller is used as a USB to serial converter.
RX Receive. Often, the connection designated to receive a signal is marked with RX.
TX Transmit. Often, the connection designated to transmit a signal is marked with TX.
USB Universal Serial Bus
TTL Transistor-transistor logic
ASCII American Standard Code For Information Interchange
WHAT THE HECK IS SERIAL COMMUNICATION?
In a nutshell, serial communication is a method of sending and receiving information one bit at a time.

Serial communication takes many different forms, we will only discuss one of them in detail here.

Just like there are many ways to communicate from one person to another, there are many ways to serially communicate from one device to another.

Probably the most familiar method of serial communication is over USB. If you didn’t know, USB stands for Universal Serial Bus.

USB is a serial communication protocol. A protocol is just a way of doing something. Maybe you have a protocol for what to do if you can’t find your phone…

Curse a couple times
Mentally walk through the places it could be
Look in the last room you were in
Blame the kids for losing your phone
Look on the bathroom shelf
Get one of your family members to call you, so you can hear it ring in the basement, buried in the laundry basket
USB is but one of many serial communication protocols that your Arduino can use. It’s also able to communicate using these common protocols…

CONTINUED...

***About Us:***
This Arduino lesson was created by Programming Electronics Academy. We are an online education company who seeks to help people learn about electronics and programming through the ubiquitous Arduino development board.

***We have no affiliation whatsoever with Arduino LLC, other than we think they are cool.***

[photoniccannon]

You’re one of the best explainers I’ve ever seen on YouTube. Like this is Khan Academy level stuff. Nice job.

[cschmitz]

This was incredibly helpful. This answered a bunch of questions that I had asked other engineers and either got explanations I didn't understand or just got a shrug. Thanks for taking the time to make this video 🙌🏽

[pourushsachdeva]

Amazing video! I am totally new to electronics and was able to understand this topic because of your wonderful explanation.

[jonathanm]

Really great format: tell 'em what you're about to tell 'em; tell 'em; then tell 'em what you told 'em. Perfect. Also, provided answers to my two unknowns: what is a uart and what is baud and why 9600. Fab.

[andreweastland]

If you send the msb first then each bit will have a different significance according to the total number of bits in the frame, sending lsb first means the first bit received is always the units bit, the second is the 2's bit and the third the fours etc. This is much simpler to implement in hardware rather than the complications of msb first.

[chaoticlue]

I was wondering what the heck serial communication is and this guy read my mind.

[fabianorlandolassomunoz]

Excellent explanation and appropriate use of didactic elements. Thanks

[mtalhakhalid]

Very helpfull sir now had better idea of how serial work thanks

[fragile-engineering]

clear and understandable. Great Video!

[thearithmos]

hahaha where were you when I was in college, studying engineering??😆😆 Nice job explaining the basics, dude keep it up👍👍

[brendanboon]

Wow what a gem of a video! If you raise the baudrate does it mean you’ll use more power and if attached to a battery it wil run out faster?

[deathsgaze]

10:25, is this little endian structure? Where the most significant part of the binary number is stored on the right.

[DodgyBrothersEngineering]

I thought TTL was Time To Live. Must have miss remembered it from my college days. Might want to check your arrow it is pointing to MSB not LSB again. I can't watch these videos without at least picking up one new thing every time. Another great video.

[winstonkabaso]

Wonderful explanation. I am a beginner kindly help me with this problem. How can a simple program be written that dynamically calculates the water volume used in a tank. Given a cubical container of breadth=5, length=10 and height =20. If the tank is filled with water to an appropriate height, I know the volume of water is volume of water = volume of tank minus volume of empty space. Now, how do is the amount of water used calculated if the volume of water keeps being removed downwards after some time?

[ahmadjaradat]

You’re one of the best explainers I’ve ever seen on YouTube. Like this is Khan Academy level stuff. Nice job.