Next steps

I hope you enjoyed our little field trip to devices outside the realm of our computer. Connecting other hardware to a machine can be much fun. As I said before, dealing with external devices is a very likely scenario for system programmers. The likelihood of encountering older, serial-based communication mechanisms is pretty high in our world.

We have discussed what serial communications are and what devices use them. We examined their protocols, especially the parity, data packet size, and stop bits. We looked at an Arduino device that measured sounds and received data from that over a serial line. We also looked at what you can do if you do not have such a device at hand.

We made the software testable and discussed the disasters that can or will happen when dealing with serial devices. Finally, we looked at some tips you can use to make your software more resilient against these failures.

All in all, we did a lot of exploring. I repeatedly mentioned how important...