Increasing the baud rate

Projects General Guidance
1

Hello,

I am working on a project where I need the microcontroller to communicate with an IMU(Inertial Measurement Unit) via an RS232 interface. Since I am using Arduino Mega2560 the maximum baud rate is 9600 (http://www.arduino.cc/en/Reference/SoftwareSerial). But the IMU needs a minimum baud rate of 115kbps. Is there any way to increase the baud rate by using a hardware device or any other means?

2

Arduino Mega2560 the maximum baud rate is 9600

No that's rubbish. Software serial might limit you to that but the Mega has four hardware ports so there is no need to use software serial.

3

Thanks for the reply. What is the maximum baud rate we can get using the hardware ports?

4

read the datasheet

or refer to WormFood's AVR Baud Rate Calculator Ver. 2.1.1

5

Thank you. But I am new to arduino boards. Can you tell me where I can find a tutorial/program on using hardware ports?

6

Have you browsed the Reference page yet?

Or the Playground?
http://arduino.cc/playground/Main/InterfacingWithHardware#Communication

Lots of good stuff on both.

7

I have used datarates well above the 115200 baud on a UNO, in particular 230400 and 345600 baud over the hardware serial. But be aware that the IDE cannot handle these speeds so you need putty.exe or realterm.exe (windows)

There are even higher speeds tested, see - http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php/topic,70283.0.html - (long thread)

Advice: write a separate sketch to test if your board behaves well with those higher speeds before integrating it into a bigger project.

8

Thank you. What should be the inputs and settings in putty.exe to run this program? Also how would a file on my computer(putty.exe) affect the communication between the microcontroller and IMU?