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Communication Protocols
How chips talk: UART, SPI, I2C, and CAN at the wire and register level — timing diagrams, tradeoffs, and the pull-up/baud/contention bugs that bite every bring-up.
3h 22m total9 lessonsBeginner friendly
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Lesson Content
0/9 done- 11Serial vs Parallel, Sync vs AsyncThe two axes that classify every bus: serial vs parallel (one wire or many) and synchronous vs asynchronous (shared clock or agreed-upon rate), and where UART, SPI, I2C, and CAN land.18 min
- 22UARTTwo wires, no clock, and a pre-agreed baud: the UART frame (start/data/parity/stop), how the receiver recovers timing by oversampling, and an interrupt-driven RX ring buffer.24 min
- 33SPIThe fast 4-wire synchronous bus: a master-driven clock, full-duplex shift registers (to read you write), chip-select per device, and the CPOL/CPHA modes both ends must match.24 min
- 44I2CMany devices on two wires: open-drain SDA/SCL with pull-ups, 7-bit addressing, ACK/NACK handshaking, clock stretching, and why a missing pull-up is the classic I2C failure.26 min
- 55Choosing UART, SPI, or I2CA side-by-side comparison and a decision framework: pick by speed, device count, pin budget, and distance, and know when none of the three fits and you need CAN or RS-485.18 min
- 66CAN BusThe robust multi-master bus behind vehicles: differential dominant/recessive bits, non-destructive bitwise arbitration by message ID, and built-in error detection with fault confinement.26 min
- 77Common Bus BugsA field guide to why a bus is dead, garbled, or flaky: pull-ups, baud/clock mismatch, drive contention, and wiring faults, plus a symptom→cause table and a scope-first method.22 min
- 88USB BasicsHost-controlled, self-describing, and far more complex than UART: enumeration, descriptors, endpoints, and the four transfer types, plus device classes like CDC that need no custom driver.22 min
- 99Modbus & 1-WireTwo field protocols beyond the big three: Modbus (industrial register access over RS-485/TCP, master/slave with CRC) and 1-Wire (a single line carrying power and data to addressable sensors).22 min
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