Software serial, timeout and interrupt

Projects Programming
1

Hello,

I'm using an Arduino BT board. The task is pretty simple: I need to forward a serial communication to another device (@ 2400 / 4800 / 9600 bps).
In other words:

[DEVICE] <----> [ARDUINO BT] <----> [PC/MOBILE]

Basically, I want to read a byte from the PC and send it to the device. Viceversa, read a byte from the device and send it to the pc.
The serial between arduino and the device should be a software one, of course. I read it's very limited because it does support neither serial.available() nor timeouts.

Because I don't know the length of the incoming packets I can't use the blocking read() function. So I'm wondering:

  1. is there the possibility to add a timeout to the read() function? If after n milliseconds nothing has been read it returns.

  2. I may connect together the RX pin with an EXT int pin (e.g. PD2). When I detect a falling edge I immediately call the serial read(). I don't know if this could work, because if the read() waiting for the start bit itself it will miss the current byte.

Any hints?

Thanks
Marco

2

Have you looked at NewSoftSerial? NewSoftSerial | Arduiniana

3

Thank you very much! I'm downloading it right now :wink: