Arduino: A Quick-Start Guide, 2nd Edition

Appendix 3Advanced Serial Programming

In nearly all of the book’s projects, we’ve used the Arduino’s serial port. Sometimes we only emitted debug messages to monitor the current state of our sketches, but often we needed it to actually output information or to send commands. And the fact is, we’ve used the Serial class without explaining how serial communication actually works. We’ll catch up on that in this appendix.

To communicate with an Arduino, we mainly used JavaScript, and in some cases we used Processing. But many developers prefer other languages, and in this appendix, you’ll also learn how to use C/C++, Java, Ruby, Python, and Perl to talk to an Arduino.