SoftwareSerial and HardwareSerial common superclass

[wa5znu]

I'm writing a library and I'd like it work with either a SoftwareSerial object or HardwareSerial (the "Serial" object).  By clearing the constructor in my library to take a Stream, I can get most of the way there. 

However, I can't call stream.begin(4800) in my library because Stream doesn't have such a begin method, and the two serial classes don't have a common superclass or interface that defines a begin method.

Is there something I'm missing?  If not, it would help in expanding use of SoftwareSerial if there were a common class that could be used.

Leigh.

[avenue33]

Please check the proxySerial library: it can handle hardware, software and I2C serial ports.

See here and there for documentation, examples, tutorial and code!

[liuzengqiang]

However, I can't call stream.begin(4800) in my library because Stream doesn't have such a begin method, and the two serial classes don't have a common superclass or interface that defines a begin method.

Alternative to avenue33's suggestion, what I did with my phi_interfaces library is to REQUIRE a Stream object that has already begun. There is no standard method to begin or end a serial port or I2C interface under Stream. The user will do the begin of whatever port and pass your library the address to the Stream object that has begun

[wa5znu]

Thank you, all. I am already using the caller-callers-begin() method, so I guess I'll stick with that. I hadn't considered the difficulties of extending to I2C.