Robofarmer:
Want to start a chicken coop mod club? I got into microcontrollers specifically because of the possibility of automating my coop.
Automating coops does seem to be a very popular project. I don't think we have a dedicated section but if you do a search on this site, lots of things come up.
dhenry:
My experience is that the uart isn't very reliable, with the internal oscillator, at 19200bps or higher (more than 10% errors - transmitted data is not the same as the data sent.) but 9600bps or lower it is fairly reliable.
Hm. I admit I haven't used it much, just printing debug info from my sketches, but haven't noticed garbage characters so far. But this may vary from chip to chip and maybe I just lucked out on a good one.
Also I upload all my sketches at 38400, but perhaps avrdude has automatic checksum/retransmission as part of it's protocol so serial errors aren't harmful?