Heartbeat from Arduino to PC via wire, how?

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8

I found my heart beat solution. And it was in fact very simple.

I used the SoftwareSerial library. It lets you use two digital pins as rx and tx on a serial port.

#include <SoftwareSerial.h>

SoftwareSerial mySerial(2, 3); // RX=D2, TX=D3

void setup()  
{
  Serial.begin(57600);
  mySerial.begin(57600);
}

void loop() // run over and over
{
  Serial.write("softwareserial");
  mySerial.write("xbeeserial");
  delay(2000);
}

And then I wired D3 on the Fio to RX1 on the FTDI. I thought I also needed to connect ground between the two, but it works without. If you want to also send from the FTDI to the Fio, just connect D2 to TX0.

The "normal" Serial, sends via the XBee radio.

Thanks for your hints, advice and help, all of you.