Hi Computer, I’m Arduino! - Using serial communication to make your Arduino talk

The Arduino is no baby that just crawls around and blinks LED’s. You can program it to speak!

We will see how to use the Arduino’s Serial library to have the Arduino talk to the computer over the USB port.

Let’s begin by making it clear that we aren’t talking about tasty breakfast while talking about Serial. Serial communication is a type of “protocol” or a procedure by which information and data is sent one after another “bit by bit” instead of all at once. A bit is the fundamental building block of digital data, consisting of a 0 or a 1.

You need not to worry about the inner working of the protocol itself, but the end-result it can accomplish: Sending messages and data back and forth from the Arduino to a computer or even other hardware and Arduinos. Let us consider communicating between a computer and Arduino for now since we will be using it extensively in the book.

Let us understand Serial Communication Library...