2.8 KiB
Example Arduino Code For Serial Communications Protocol
This is an Arduino example/library of my serial communications protocol which implements checksums, acknowledge and repeat commands to normal serial communication, while still keeping the end user experience simple and intuitive.
Command Packet Contents
Bellow is an illustration of a command packet which is sent out by the library.
Each command packet consists of an instructions packet, a checksum and an end bit, with each part being seperated by a separator bit. The istructions packet consists of a command and a data part, which are again separated by a bit. In the current form of the protocol the separator bit is a # and the terminator bit is a @.
An example command would look something like this ERR#Something went wrong#4342@. In the that example we are sending a command ERR with the arguments of Something went wrong and the 4342 is an auto generated checksum.
All the data is currently being transmitted in plain-text, however in future versions of the library they will be encoded in hex and sent that way.
High Level Communications Overview
Bellow is a high level overview on how the communications protocol works and what gets sent between the two communicating devices. The left side of the diagram represents the communication when the command arrives to the receiver intact and on the right is a representation of what happens when the checksum is wrong(i.e. The command packet is malformed).
It is important to note that the user never sees the ACKG/RPT commands be sent or the validation process take place. All the end user sees is the action assigned to a given command be executed once it's been confirmed as intact.
Using The Library
This section describes how to get the library working in a project of your own.
Importing Into A New Project
To import the library in to a project of your own there are only two files you need to bring in. One is src/serialConnector.cpp and the other is its associated header file include/serialConnector.h. Once those two are coppied these two in to your project make sure the includes are still correct. Then in your main.cpp you need to create a new instance of the SerialConnector class and to parse any incomming commands you need to call the newly created instance's cycle method. Bellow is an example of what that would look like.
#include <serialConnector.h>
SerialConnector *conn = new SerialConnector()
void setup() {}
void loop()
{
conn->cycle();
}
Any time the cycle method is called it scans the serial buffer for any new commands and if there's something it processes those incomming commands it automatically processes that command, checks it's integrity and executes any handler functions associated with it.