Embedded Communication Protocols - From Electrons to Data
A complete guide to embedded communication protocols: UART, SPI, I2C, CAN, RS-485 and more. from the physics of voltage levels all the way to high-level data framing.
Embedded Communication Protocols. From Electrons to Data
Pick any embedded system. a drone, a car ECU, an industrial energy meter, a smart thermostat. and somewhere inside it, chips are talking to each other. They're exchanging bytes over a handful of wires, following rules they both agreed on before power even came on.
This series is about those rules. All of them. Starting from the very bottom.
We'll go from bare metal. what voltage means, why pull-up resistors exist, what "open-drain" actually does. up through UART, SPI, I2C, CAN, RS-485, Modbus, and finally to the question everyone eventually asks: which one do I pick for my project?
The ladder from electrons to data
Rendering diagram...
| Part | Topic |
|---|---|
| 1 | Logic Levels & Electrical Signals |
| 2 | UART |
| 3 | SPI |
| 4 | I2C |
| 5 | CAN Bus |
| 6 | RS-485 & Modbus |
| 7 | Protocol Stacks |
| 8 | Choosing the Right Protocol |
Each protocol in this series is a trade-off. Speed vs distance. Simplicity vs robustness. Wire count vs device count. None of them is universally better than the others. the best one is whichever fits your constraints. The goal here is to give you enough depth that you can actually make that call, not just copy an example from a forum and hope for the best.