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!

nRF24L01+ Transceiver Hookup Guide

July 30, 2015

A basic getting started guided to the SparkFun Transceiver Breakout - nRF24L01+

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.

MIDI Shield Hookup Guide

October 8, 2015

How to assemble the SparkFun MIDI Shield, plus several example projects.

MIDI Tutorial

October 8, 2015

Understanding the Musical Instrument Digital Interface.

BC118 BLE Mate 2 Hookup Guide

January 15, 2015

Hooking up and using the BLE Mate 2, which uses the BC118 BLE module from BlueCreations.

ASCII

June 13, 2016

A brief history of how ASCII came to be, how it's useful to computers, and some helpful tables to convert numbers to characters.

Hexadecimal

March 20, 2014

How to interpret hex numbers, and how to convert them to/from decimal and binary.
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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Please be aware that the tutorials you find there are no longer actively maintained.