Alternatively, the IIC is a single master / multiple slave bus that also uses a clock and so is for across-board communications - and generally not for long distances.

As the data is synchronized with a clock, the bandwidth can be very high for this port (approaching 100MHz) however over long distances (a cable of 4 feet for instance) clock skew will accumulate and consequently this interface is not good for long distance transmission, but rather for moving data between chips on a board.

Check the SPI demo and the IIC demo if interested.įor context, SPI is a simple clock, enable and data (one for half duplex and two for full) interface. We will use UART the (AKA RS232 and Serial Port) in this lab. The MSP430 microcontroller offers 3 different types of communications using its USCI peripheral including: SPI, IIC and UART. There are several versions of both synchronous and asynchronous serial communication. The difference is that synchronous serial communication uses a dedicated communication channel to send a clock signal which provides the timing between the transmitter and receiver devices. Serial communications can be divided into two categories, synchronous and asynchronous.

On the receiver side, the microcontroller will trigger different LEDs depending in the received command. The transmitter module will generate three different signals based on the user input from external push buttons.

In this lab, students will develop a simple transmitter and receiver module in which two microcontrollers will exchange 1 byte messages. This lab is based on using the Serial Communications module in the MSP430 microcontroller for asynchronous serial communication.

Uart serial communication pdf