Two Port Receive

Arduino boards have built in support for serial communication on pins 0 and 1, but what if you need more serial ports? The SoftwareSerial Library has been developed to allow serial communication to take place on the other digital pins of your boards, using software to replicate the functionality of the hardwired RX and TX lines. This can be extremely helpful when the need arises to communicate with two serial enabled devices, or to talk with just one device while leaving the main serial port open for debugging purpose.

In the example below, digital pins 8 and 10 on your Arduino board are used as virtual RX serial lines. Pins 9 and 11 are virtual TX lines. The board listens on one virtual port (portOne) until it has read all available data. After that, it does the same on the second virtual port (portTwo).

Hardware Required

  • Arduino Board

Circuit

There is no circuit for this example. Make sure that your Arduino board is attached to your computer via USB to enable serial communication through the serial monitor window of the Arduino Software (IDE).

ArduinoUNO bb

image developed using Fritzing. For more circuit examples, see the Fritzing project page

Schematics

ArduinoUNO sch

image developed using Fritzing. For more circuit examples, see the Fritzing project page

Code


/*

  Software serial multple serial test

 Receives from the two software serial ports,

 sends to the hardware serial port.

 In order to listen on a software port, you call port.listen().

 When using two software serial ports, you have to switch ports

 by listen()ing on each one in turn. Pick a logical time to switch

 ports, like the end of an expected transmission, or when the

 buffer is empty. This example switches ports when there is nothing

 more to read from a port

 The circuit:

 Two devices which communicate serially are needed.

 * First serial device's TX attached to digital pin 10(RX), RX to pin 11(TX)

 * Second serial device's TX attached to digital pin 8(RX), RX to pin 9(TX)

 Note:

 Not all pins on the Mega and Mega 2560 support change interrupts,

 so only the following can be used for RX:

 10, 11, 12, 13, 50, 51, 52, 53, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69

 Not all pins on the Leonardo support change interrupts,

 so only the following can be used for RX:

 8, 9, 10, 11, 14 (MISO), 15 (SCK), 16 (MOSI).

 created 18 Apr. 2011

 modified 19 March 2016

 by Tom Igoe

 based on Mikal Hart's twoPortRXExample

 This example code is in the public domain.

 */

#include <SoftwareSerial.h>
// software serial #1: RX = digital pin 10, TX = digital pin 11

SoftwareSerial portOne(10, 11);

// software serial #2: RX = digital pin 8, TX = digital pin 9
// on the Mega, use other pins instead, since 8 and 9 don't work on the Mega

SoftwareSerial portTwo(8, 9);

void setup() {

  // Open serial communications and wait for port to open:

  Serial.begin(9600);

  while (!Serial) {

    ; // wait for serial port to connect. Needed for native USB port only

  }

  // Start each software serial port

  portOne.begin(9600);

  portTwo.begin(9600);
}

void loop() {

  // By default, the last intialized port is listening.

  // when you want to listen on a port, explicitly select it:

  portOne.listen();

  Serial.println("Data from port one:");

  // while there is data coming in, read it

  // and send to the hardware serial port:

  while (portOne.available() > 0) {

    char inByte = portOne.read();

    Serial.write(inByte);

  }

  // blank line to separate data from the two ports:

  Serial.println();

  // Now listen on the second port

  portTwo.listen();

  // while there is data coming in, read it

  // and send to the hardware serial port:

  Serial.println("Data from port two:");

  while (portTwo.available() > 0) {

    char inByte = portTwo.read();

    Serial.write(inByte);

  }

  // blank line to separate data from the two ports:

  Serial.println();
}

See also

Last revision 2018/05/17 by SM