Hi,
I need a soft-UART in an ATmega168PA which has to perform a few other duties (eg reading DS1820s) in parallel.
I know of the two approaches:
- wait for the falling edge at the start bit, then start a timer and at each OCRA interrupt, sample the RxD pin
- let the timer run freely (with a higher frequency), then sample the RxD pin and eg use a state machine to determine what to do with the state of RxD.
I have been thinking about using different approach, using a Pin-Change-interrupt and then calculate the received bits from the deltaT between the last PCI and this one. I need 9600 bps, system clock is 16MHz and I think that running TIMER0 with clk[I/=]/64 should work: when I get the falling edge of the start bit, I start the timer. when I get the next rising edge, I determine the number of clock ticks and eg when they are less that 39, then only a single bit has arrived when they are less then 65, then two identical bits have arrived ...
If I use eg TIMER0 (8-bit), then the timer reaches TOP (255) somewhere inside the STOP bit, which sounds perfect to me.
Has this been tried before?
Josef