Beginning Arduino Programming

SoftwareSerial Library

While Listing 10-2 could work fine with the RFID reader connected to the RX pin, or pin 0 on the Arduino board, it would be a pain to have to disconnect the reader each time we want to upload a new sketch. Or we might have a second serial device that we need to talk to in addition to the RFID reader. In order to have more serial ports than what our hardware comes with, we can use a library that will create a software serial port for us that act almost like the hardware version. To create software-based serial ports, we need to use the SoftwareSerial library, an all-new library as of Arduino version 1.0, based on the previous library formally known as NewSoftSerial, written by Mikal Hart. This new library replaces the old ...