6.1.4. UART Control

The OpenMV Cam has a main UART on pins P4 (TX) and P5 (RX) which you can use for serial communication. To create a UART object do the following:

import pyb

uart = pyb.UART(3, 115200, timeout_char = 1000)

First, let’s breakdown what we did. The first argument is the UART bus. This is the index of the UART bus on the OpenMV Cam. You have to call the UART constructor with this value because we’re leveraging the pyb module from MicroPython’s pyboard. The second value is the baudrate which can be any standard baudrate value you like. Finally, the third argument tells the driver to wait up to 1 second between sending chars if the UART is busy. The default value for timeout_char of 0 causes the driver to abadon sending characters if your code ever has to block waiting for space in the UART buffer which is something you don’t want (generally).

Anyway, once you’ve got a UART object then sending data is easy. Just do:

uart.write("Hello World\n")

And that’s it.

But, if you’d like to send binary data instead, use the struct module. The struct module will let you serialize data easily. Here’s an example:

import ustruct

uart.write(ustruct.pack("<lhb", a_32_bit_value, a_16_bit_value, a_8_bit_value))

The first string above tells ustruct how to pack data into a byte stream. “<” means the data will be packed in little-endian format. “l” means pack a long, “h” means pack a short, and “b” means pack a byte. See the Python Struct Module for more information.

Now, if you’d like to receive data just use the pyb.UART.any() method along with the pyb.UART.read() method. Note that you’ll need to code up some sort of state machine to receive data reliability. For example, see the Examples->Pixy Emulation->pixy_uart_emulation.py example.