Library makes Arduino to Arduino serial communications dead simple
posted May 31st 2011 1:01pm by Mike Nathanfiled under: arduino hacks
When [Bill Porter] works on a project, he says that he typically writes his own NMEA standard communications protocols to fit the job at hand. While it makes things easy to troubleshoot, he admits that his custom protocols are wasteful of both processor time and bandwidth. Binary communications on the other hand are more efficient, but a bit trickier to manage.
To make things easy for the common user, he wrote a library called EasyTransfer which abstracts packetized serial communications between two Arduino boards. The process is pretty simple – all one has to do is define a data structure on both Arduino boards so that they know what sort of data is coming over the wire, and EasyTransfer handles the rest. This allows users to worry less about communications protocols or transmission errors, and focus on their projects instead.
If you’re working on a project and searching for an easy way to get a pair of Arduinos talking, swing by his site and grab the library. It doesn’t get much easier.
Thanks for the post Mike, though I really didn’t think this warranted a full post, I was only hoping to be in the next ‘Arduino Moment’ combo article.
I wrote this in a day as a way to help out the handful of people that email me asking for help getting one Arduino with a PS2 controller (using my other library) to talk to the other. It’s a simple library with not much to it.
Most Arduino user will undoubtedly know how to handle communications. This library is nothing special; it was targeted for the extreme beginner with no idea how to begin.