class UART – duplex serial communication bus

UART implements the standard UART/USART duplex serial communications protocol. At the physical level it consists of 2 lines: RX and TX. The unit of communication is a character (not to be confused with a string character) which can be 8 or 9 bits wide.

UART objects can be created and initialised using:

from machine import UART

uart = UART(1, 9600)                         # init with given baudrate
uart.init(9600, bits=8, parity=None, stop=1) # init with given parameters

Supported parameters differ on a board:

Pyboard: Bits can be 7, 8 or 9. Stop can be 1 or 2. With parity=None, only 8 and 9 bits are supported. With parity enabled, only 7 and 8 bits are supported.

WiPy/CC3200: Bits can be 5, 6, 7, 8. Stop can be 1 or 2.

A UART object acts like a stream object and reading and writing is done using the standard stream methods:

uart.read(10)       # read 10 characters, returns a bytes object
uart.read()         # read all available characters
uart.readline()     # read a line
uart.readinto(buf)  # read and store into the given buffer
uart.write('abc')   # write the 3 characters

Constructors

class machine.UART(id, ...)

Construct a UART object of the given id.

Methods

UART.deinit()

Turn off the UART bus.

UART.any()

Returns an integer counting the number of characters that can be read without blocking. It will return 0 if there are no characters available and a positive number if there are characters. The method may return 1 even if there is more than one character available for reading.

For more sophisticated querying of available characters use select.poll:

poll = select.poll()
poll.register(uart, select.POLLIN)
poll.poll(timeout)
UART.read([nbytes])

Read characters. If nbytes is specified then read at most that many bytes, otherwise read as much data as possible.

Return value: a bytes object containing the bytes read in. Returns None on timeout.

UART.readinto(buf[, nbytes])

Read bytes into the buf. If nbytes is specified then read at most that many bytes. Otherwise, read at most len(buf) bytes.

Return value: number of bytes read and stored into buf or None on timeout.

UART.readline()

Read a line, ending in a newline character.

Return value: the line read or None on timeout.

UART.write(buf)

Write the buffer of bytes to the bus.

Return value: number of bytes written or None on timeout.

UART.sendbreak()

Send a break condition on the bus. This drives the bus low for a duration longer than required for a normal transmission of a character.