Where can I get the Braccio shield V4, Serial port (yellow) pinout?
The only information about the yellow serial connector in Arduino website is the following: "The 4-pin SERIAL connector allows the board to communicate with other devices that support serial communication. Ground and 5 volt connections are provided on the connector for your convenience."
However, there is no documentation identifying which pin is the TX, RX, 5V, and GND.
BOB,
I have seen this project too. However, there is no PWR and GND pinout at the shield as this project uses external power and ground. Besides, how do you know TX from the ARM parent is connected to the Braccio shield RX without knowing the ARM parent feature? It might be acting like an adapter to an RF device in this case the TX will be connected to the Braccio shield TX port.
Therefore, your "less than 30 seconds on GOOGLE" is neither a reliable source nor a good practice to use online mambo jambo.
Why are we supposed to use unreliable sources on a product we paid money for it.
Thank you,
There doesn't seem to be a lot of information out there, but this thread has this to say:
The yellow connector labeled SERIAL uses the pins as follows:
Ground
+5V
Tx
Rx
although honestly, you could check the pinout yourself in two seconds with a multimeter. Each of the four pins on the Serial header is going to be going to one of four pins on the Arduino- GND, 5V, Pin 0 or Pin 1.
Fekadu:
Therefore, your "less than 30 seconds on GOOGLE" is neither a reliable source nor a good practice to use online mambo jambo.
Why are we supposed to use unreliable sources on a product we paid money for it.
I do think there is some validity to your complaint. We have come to expect a higher quality of documentation from Arduino products than what is provided for the Braccio. This sort of question has come up regularly. I believe the problem is that this is not actually an Arduino product. It is made by TinkerKit. The information on the Arduino Store page for this product is the information TinkerKit provided. I notice the TinkerKit website doesn't even load and they have no web presence other than a GitHub account that has been inactive for years. So it seems they have reaped the rewards of their flawed approach to selling in this market.
I see this too often. A company makes some decent hardware targeted to the electronics hobbyist market, but then doesn't make the effort to provide sufficient support and documentation. Unless they get super lucky and are adopted by an active volunteer community that does that job for them, the product fails.
The fact is, it's not a terribly rare occurrence to find that official information about some piece of electronics is lacking. So it is important to hone your skills for gaining the information yourself via research and experimentation.
Per, TinkerKit are same people as Arduino
commits in GitHub repo are by Massimo Banzi, David Cuartielles
I did a bit more research and the information from an Arduino employee I found is TinkerKit was a project of arduino.org. Although .org was quite bad about providing documentation for their products, I can see that they actually did provide this for the Braccio shield. Check the "Documentation" tab of this page:
Braccio
unfortunately, archive.org does not archive those files
So that's quite unfortunate that Arduino didn't follow the lead of arduino.org after they inherited this product from them. It seems like the .org products never got much love after the Arduino vs. Arduino thing was resolved.
Thank you all,
I checked continuity between the Arduino Uno header pins and the serial connector pins of the shield and I'm able to figure out which pin is which and now the serial port is serving purpose.
So, we can pertained as if problem is solved. This robotic arm is really an excellent product for its fit-form-function and for the price too; however, without a good quality documentation, it wont be as good as it could be.
Anyhow, thank you all for your support.
FK
