I had a question about what kind of serial the Arduino chip expects to see on download.
From the prefs file it appears to default to
19200 baud
8 databits
1 stopbit
no parity
Does the chip expect True logic or Inverted? I'm guessing True coming out of the FTDI chip?
I was also going to put some of this into the Serial docs in reference - maybe there should just be an item that says "Serial" with a little explanation of how serial works?
serial.burn_rate=115200 // What is this, the ICSP bootloader burn?
Yea, some of that information is documented on the bootloader page (http://www.arduino.cc/en/Hacking/Bootloader), but it could certainly use some clarification and expansion. It wouldn't hurt to add it to the spec as well. I'm not sure that the reference needs to talk about the bootloader baud rate, but we definitely need better documentation of what serial communication is, how one can use it (e.g. how to talk over USB, via TTL serial, or over RS232), and what gets transmitted (e.g. binary vs. ASCII data). It's a top priority on the bugs list. Paul, if you wanted to write a tutorial on serial communication in general, that would be awesome.