Secondary Serial Port

[ecburns33]

I am trying to connect a motor to the board using a RS-232 serial connection. From my understanding, there are libraries designed to do this, but to initialize the connection, the name of the serial port is of course needed. It doesn't seem like there is a another serial port on the board apart from the USB I use to interface with my computer. Would I just be able to use GPIO pins to make the connection? If so, how would I initialize that? Thank you, as always.

[maholli]

Hi @ecburns33

This is doable, but you may want to consider other options. See below.

My past experiences with RS-232 have all been +-12V which is far beyond the voltage range of most modern microcontrollers (like the one on PyCubed). This means you'll likely want a UART-to-RS232 converter. Which could lead you down another rabbit hole...

Here's how I'd approach this:

1. See if your motor board has a UART option. Use TX2/RX2 on the payload connector for UART.
2. RS-232 isn't very common these days. It may be cheaper to buy a different motor controller board than spend the time getting this one working.
3. If you're really committed to this motor board, get a UART-to-RS232 converter and use the TX2/RX2 pins on the payload connector. Depending on if your motor board is using CTS, RTS, etc... signals, you may need to use GPIO to implement those as well.

P.S. if you don't have the GPS populated on your PyCubed board, you could use the GPS UART pins (TX/RX pins) for an additional UART channel as well.