In this tutorial, I present a fictional SPI chip that we will use for the sake of example. This chip has two LED's and controls them over SPI. It will help us to understand SPI with a real worked example. Following on we will build a real world circuit, using the SPI library, to see how easy it is to use...
In this article, I present an example showing how to connect an Arduino device to your PC using USB serial and Java. USB serial is available on nearly all Arduino based boards. Further, there are serial interface Java libraries that can connect to an Arduino. If you are unfamiliar with data communications in general, take a look a the introduction to...
Using sockets for client / server development Following on from Using sockets for a character based stream we now introduce the idea of messaging. When we need to send commands between two systems (often referred to as client and server) we normally use message based communication, this was briefly discussed in the data communications introduction. For this example we will...
Following on from the article Introduction to data communications we will now go into more depth, by looking at an example of stream based communication. We will use sockets for the example; mainly because sockets are available out of the box on any computer connected to the internet. A socket is a stream based connection between a server and a...
In this section I discuss communication protocols; we start with a grounding on the basics and move through to some worked examples. To start with let’s look at some of the simplest cases and understand how communications between computer systems work in practise. There are many methods of communicating between two computers, be they embedded, mobile, desktop or server. Protocols range...