Uno 2 serial ports ?

Using Arduino Programming Questions
1

OK so i have an arduino uno and i want to run 2 serial ports, I know I have pins 0/1 for UART communication, can I configure other pins to be a serial port as well? like on the SPI bus, pins 11/12

2

Pins 0 and 1 form a hardware serial port. Other pins can be used with NewSoftSerial to form a software serial port.

3

PaulS:
Pins 0 and 1 form a hardware serial port. Other pins can be used with NewSoftSerial to form a software serial port.

awesome found it

The software serial connection can run at 4800 baud or 9600 baud reliably.

but can i still set it to other baud rates?

is there a rule of thumb of which serial port should be set to soft port & hard port?

4

awesome found it
http://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/SoftwareSerial

You might want to look some more:
http://arduiniana.org/libraries/NewSoftSerial/

but can i still set it to other baud rates?

Lower or higher? NewSoftSerial supports up to 115200.

is there a rule of thumb of which serial port should be set to soft port & hard port?

Yes. The hardware port should be set to hard. Anything else is soft.

5

PaulS:

awesome found it
http://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/SoftwareSerial

You might want to look some more:
NewSoftSerial | Arduiniana

but can i still set it to other baud rates?

Lower or higher? NewSoftSerial supports up to 115200.

is there a rule of thumb of which serial port should be set to soft port & hard port?

Yes. The hardware port should be set to hard. Anything else is soft.

awesome thanks, 115200 is one of the speed i'm after.

what i meant by hard or soft was one of the device i'm going to hook up is going to be shotgun assaulting data at the serial port/ arduino, so would it be better to to put it that on the pins with a FIFO....
i think i figured out how i want to hook it up...

PC to hard 0/1
device 1 = softserial 1
device 2 = softserial 2 (high data traffic)
device 3= softserial 3

6

If you need more than two serial ports (one hardware, one software), it's time to go shopping. You can't run multiple instances of the software serial class the way you seem to think you can. You really need a Mega with 4 hardware serial ports.

7

NSS can have multiple instances but they can't all be banging away at the same time.

Rob

8

You can also add more serial ports with an SPI to serial chip like this one
NXP Semi SC16IS752
http://www.nxp.com/documents/data_sheet/SC16IS752_SC16IS762.pdf
Skyjumper is using it on his 1284-based card. 1284 plus that chip = 4 serial ports and still less than the price of a 2560 chip.