Ever heard of bits and bytes? Individually, these 1s and 0s are bits, and when they are in groups of 8, they are called bytes !Ī byte might look something like this: 10111001Īs it turns out, this sequence of eight represents a number the same way a number like 597 represents five hundred ninety-seven. These highs and lows in a digital signal represent 1s and 0s respectively that, when put together in sequence, carry information that can be interpreted by microcontrollers. In a digital signal, data is transferred as a sequence of high to low and low to high switchings that occur very rapidly. Before we discuss communication protocols, we’ll first discuss how these signals are transmitted. Inter-device communication occurs over digital signals. In this tutorial, we hope to introduce the standard communication protocols that electronic devices use and explain each of them in detail using Arduino Uno. With any serious hobby electronics work, you’re bound to run into one or more of the main communication protocols in use, be it when working with different sensors, or with modules such as the ESP8266. Devices need to communicate with each other to relay information about the environment, express changes in their states, or request auxiliary actions be performed. Today we will be discussing Arduino communication protocols. 3 protocols for device communication: UART, SPI, and I2C.