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Testing serial devices with Akafuino L

2012.11.15

Here's a little neat trick. Have you ever found yourself with a new serial device that you want to connect to a Arduino, but you want to try it out and talk to it directly first? On Arduino UNO it was pretty easy, just connect the device to pin 0 and 1 (Serial) and hold the reset down, the computer would then talk directly to the device. As the uC would be resetting it would not interupt the communication.

On the new Akafuino L the USB port and the serial port is not connected directly, in fact pin 0 and 1 are connected to a second serial port (Serial1), so it is even easier to do it. We tried google for some code to pass through communication from USB to the second serial port, but found nothing, so we decided to write a small tutorial.

All you need is to connect VCC, GND and cross rx and tx between the device and your Akafuino1 L. Then upload the following program and all characters sent to your device will be passed through to the Akafuino L.

Code block with id '24' not found.

This works on official Arduino Leonardo as well.