Interesting thought....

[Jake M]

Not that I actually intend to try this, if it is possible, except perhaps for educational purposes, but would it be theoretically possible to generate your own serial communation/TTL port, through a Digital IO. Setup a timer and interrupt to get the right baud rate, and just set a digital output to either 0 or 1 at each interrupt, so it would operate like a TX signal. TTL uses the 0V to 5V logic, correct? If the signal pin doesn't provide enough voltage, maybe just let it trigger a transistor, which is connected to 5V.

Mostly, I'm asking this to confirm my understanding of how serial communication actually works, and I'm guessing I'm still a little bit off. It seems a tad too simple, the way I explained it. And if I am understanding things correctly, my next guess is that the interrupts will be triggering too often, slowing down the rest of the code. Am I on track at all?