I am having trouble getting the Camera shield to work using the hardware serial port to communicate with the camera. The Software Serial port on pins 2,3 or 4,5 works fine until I start using another software serial port to communicate with the XBee radio on the Stalker V2.3 that I have the Camera Shield installed on. The arduino reference says Atmega 328 based arduinos can only receive on one Software Serial port at a time. Hence my attempt to use the Hardware Serial port option which is described on the Camera Shield Wiki.
Based on the Wiki for the camera shield and some assumptions I had to make about what should be done to the hardware I did the following:
1. I commented out the two lines in my sketch derived from the example snapshot specifying Software serial and uncommented the line specifying hardware serial VC0706 cam = VC0706(&Serial1). It wouldn’t compile with Serial1 so I changed it to Serial. The stalker has only one serial port. This suggests that use of the hardware port may only be intended for users of the the arduino Mega and other boards with multiple serial ports. Can the hardware serial port be made to work on the Stalker? I have been unsuccessful thus far. I have removed all the Serial.print statements from my code and I pull the camera board off to program the stalker which seems to mostly work but I get no commuincation (orange LED flashes ) in this configuration.
2. Change the #Define USE_SOFTWARE_SERIAL in VC0706_UART.h FROM 1 TO ZERO.
3. Move the CMR_RX and CMR_TX jumpers on the camera board from pins 2,3 to 0,1 respectively. The Wiki gives no hint these need to be moved.
4. I cut the UART Select solder bridges to GPIO1, GPIO0 of the VC0706 and soldered across to the alternate connections UART_RXD and UART_TXD respectively which I am assuming are the hardware UART connections that should be used for hardware serial communication with the arduino. Is this right?
5. I pulled off the Uartsbee 6 pin serial connector to the stalker and replaced it with a two pin connector to supply +5V to the USB5V pin which provides 5V to the camera shield.
QUESTION: Did I made the right hardware modifications to use the Hardware serial port for communication with the camera? Do I need to make any other changes to the code to use Serial instead of Serial1? Any other guidance would be appreciated.
Note the schematic doesn’t show the LEDs for the SD card or the Camera on it. It neglects to show the camera chip as well. These are not show stoppers but, they do make me wonder what else is missing from the schematic.
Mark