Photon multiple serial interface

Hardware
1

Greetings,

Im working on a project where i might user Photons and Electrons for the communication part. The big problem that im facing is that i have to use 2 Serial ports, ideal 3. So i will need 3 serial ports on the Photon side.

One connects to an RFID reader, other to the motherboard of a machine and one more for a future use.

So far from what i see on Photon i have only one serial interface that i can use with a level shifter and the rest of the 2 are lack. so i wanted to ask you guys how could i have this setup possible , is there anything that i could use in order to achieve this ?

I read little bit about SPI but i heard that are little complicated and i guess i`ll get more headache on that.

Ideal will be to have like a board where i can put the photon or the electron and all the circuits to work with one or another.

So far on electron i see 3 ports and would be perfect unless i have big data traffic.

Thanks in advance .

2

If you could give us some more background, we might be able to come up with other suggestions, but if you think of using an Electron anyway, you are in luck, because it has three UARTs readily available
https://docs.particle.io/datasheets/electron-datasheet/#peripherals-and-gpio
https://docs.particle.io/datasheets/electron-datasheet/#pinout-diagram

And if you desperately want to use the Photon, you could have two UARTs, but would loose the on-board RGB LED and would need to desolder two SMD resistors.
https://docs.particle.io/reference/firmware/photon/#serial

3

Well for the moment i have to interact with a vending machine , the way how it works, you have to connect the serial to it , put a password, enter in one menu and get statistics data , so far for the moment it might be ok, in the future i might need to put an rfid reader in order to have it as rfid payment, i was thinking to use the 13.56MHz ones from adafruit as in this way it can work as offline as well and keep some logics on the rfid card. So far if i go with this board ill be able to use it as SPI , i2C or UART, i just have to see if i have any libraries on the build for it. Its the PN532 model.

the 3-rd port might be for the cash acceptors but not sure yet but i`ll let you know.

Thanks.

1 Like
4

Don’t let yourself put off the use of SPI or I2C - there is no black magic involved :wink: