Sending data to a serial terminal via a USB Host Shield

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1

I seem to be having a problem finding the information I need to be able to send characters from an Arduino to a serial terminal via a USB Host Shield.

It seems like it would be simple enough, but everything I have come across so far seems to make it so much more complex than I thought it should be.

My setup, at the moment, is an Arduino that reads some switches and then sends a character built from the value of the switches to an LCD display. That part works fine. I can get any character I want on the LCD display merely by setting the switches to some value.

Now what I want to do is take that same character and send it thru a USB Host Shield to a USB to Serial dongle attached to a serial terminal so the same character displays on the terminal screen!

Sounds easy enough, but so far I've been stumped by the USB Host Shield setup and use.

Arduino sells a USB Host Shield, which is the one I bought, but doesn't seem to produce a lot of "documentation" on how to implement it.

Thanks for any suggestions.

2

I hate to answer a "how do I" with "why do it". I really hat to. However, why?

Why convert the Arduinos native Serial to USB and then convert USB back to Serial?
Why not just attach the Serial host to the Arduino RX and TX Pins?

3

You may also wish to Review: https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoUSBHostShield

4

To make a long story much shorter, there is some code conversion going on and the "serial terminal" that eventually displays the character I'm trying to send is at a much slower baud rate than USB can handle. The particular USB to Serial dongle I'm using handles the baud rate conversion for me.

:slight_smile:

5

And thanks for the link, but that is where I really ran into "this looks much more difficult than I thought it should be.' The examples were what I found to be very complex and even though I tried several of them I never saw any data going to my serial dongle, just on the serial.monitor screen.