Communication

Embedded electronics is all about interlinking circuits (processors or other integrated circuits) to create a symbiotic system. In order for those individual circuits to swap their information, they must share a common communication protocol. Hundreds of communication protocols have been defined to achieve this data exchange, and, in general, each can be separated into one of two categories: parallel or serial. Serial UARTs, SPI, and I2C are used with many products in the SparkFun catalog to pass data. They can be used with a serial terminal to help troubleshoot issues or display data. However, there are other methods of communication some of which include IR, RS-232, RS-485, CAN, MIDI, and DMX. Check out the tutorials below to start relaying data between your devices!

IR Control Kit Hookup Guide

October 2, 2013
How to get the most out of the infrared receivers and transmitters included in the IR Control Kit.

Serial Terminal Basics

September 9, 2013
This tutorial will show you how to communicate with your serial devices using a variety of terminal emulator applications.

I2C

July 8, 2013
An introduction to I2C, one of the main embedded communications protocols in use today.

IR Communication

February 7, 2013
This tutorial explains how common infrared (IR) communication works, as well as shows you how to set up a simple IR transmitter and receiver with an Arduino.

Binary

February 7, 2013
Binary is the numeral system of electronics and programming...so it must be important to learn. But, what is binary? How does it translate to other numeral systems like decimal?

Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI)

January 14, 2013
SPI is commonly used to connect microcontrollers to peripherals such as sensors, shift registers, and SD cards.

Serial Communication

December 18, 2012
Asynchronous serial communication concepts: packets, signal levels, baud rates, UARTs and more!
Communication
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Old Tutorials

Looking for the old, archived tutorials? Head on over to the archived tutorials on the main SparkFun site.
Please be aware that the tutorials you find there are no longer actively maintained.