The documentation says that the BotBoarduino is based upon the Due. The phrase “based upon” is incredibly vague, so I need some more info. Depending on what documentation you refer to, the Due has either 2 or 3 hardware serial connections. According to the Due docs, the Due has a “Native USB” serial connection and a “Programming” serial connection, but according to the documentation for the Arduino Serial command, the Due has a total of 3 serial ports.
What I would like to do is establish one serial connection between the BotBoarduino and my Mac for programming, sending commands to the Sketch running on the BotBoarduino, and debugging output from the BotBoarduino. I also want to establish a second serial connection between the BotBoarduino and the SSC-32U for servo commands, sequencing, etc. I would prefer to use the hardware UARTs, rather than burn processor cycles on software serial.
So, my question is this: What pins correspond to the Programming Serial port, and do I use Serial1 to access them or… ?
I think this misunderstanding might stem from older documentation that referred to the Due as in the Arduino Duemilanove. Since then, the Arduino Due was created which may be confusing to some users. Please note that the BotBoarduino is based on the Duemillanove design (AVR based), not the Due (newer, unrelated, ARM based).
That should probably clear up some of the confusion about how many serial ports are available on the BotBoarduino (only one hardware). You can use SoftwareSerial very effectively, though.
You should be able to do this using the provided USB port which is tied to the hardware serial port on the BotBoarduino’s AVR microcontroller.
If you do not want to use software serial then you will need to use a different microcontroller board with 2 or more hardware serial ports. You may want to look at Teensy boards which use very powerful microcontrollers and are quite affordable and well supported.
Please note that using the USB/hardware serial for comm/debug and software serial from the BotBoarduino to the SSC-32U for sequencing is how all of the official SESv1 Lynxmotion platforms work (quadrupeds, hexapods, humanoids, robotic arms, rovers, etc.).
As you can read above there are no extra hardware serial ports on the BotBoarduino.
