UART input on SD Shield v3?

I’ve purchased the RadioShack version of the SD Shield v3.

I’m trying to pass in data from a GPS breakout board and have my Arduino UNO receive the data over SoftwareSerial and have the SD Shield write the data to an SD card.

  1. I can communicate just fine with the GPS board over SoftwareSerial when not using the SD Shield.
  2. I can communicate just fine with the SD shield and even remove, create and write to files on the SD card.
  3. When I try to mix #1 and #2, it appears that I cannot see the data that’s coming in over SoftwareSerial. I do, however, appear to still have full access to the SD card and remove/create/read/write capabilities.

I’m trying to use SoftwareSerial over pins 2 and 3, but I’ve also tried 7 and 8 and other combinations.

I think I know that pins 10-13 are in use by the SD Shield, but am I missing something else? I swear I had this working a few hours ago, but now I’ve got nothing. Getting the data in isn’t very useful if I can’t do something with it. Being able to write data isn’t very useful if I can’t get the data in.

Can somebody please help?!?

Here’s a sketch that works for me to see the data streaming in from GPS:

#include <SoftwareSerial.h> SoftwareSerial gps(2,3); void setup() { Serial.begin(19200); gps.begin(19200); } void loop() { if(Serial.available()) { char c = Serial.read(); Serial.write(c); } if(Serial.available()) { gps.write(Serial.read()); } }

Here’s a sketch that works to write dummy data to my SD card (while setting up the SoftwareSerial, but not trying to read it):

#include <SD.h> #include <SoftwareSerial.h> #include <TinyGPS.h> SoftwareSerial gpsSerial(2,3); const int chipSelect = 10; TinyGPS gps; File dataFile; char* dataFileName = "dataLog.csv"; int lines = 0; boolean connected = false; boolean initialized = false; char dataLine[100]; int dataLinePos = 0; boolean live = true; void setup() { Serial.begin(9600); gpsSerial.begin(19200); Serial.print("\nInitializing SD card..."); pinMode(10, OUTPUT); if (!SD.begin(chipSelect)) { Serial.println("Card failed, or not present"); return; } Serial.println("card initialized."); if (SD.exists(dataFileName)) { SD.remove(dataFileName); } dataFile = SD.open(dataFileName, FILE_WRITE); if (dataFile) { initialized = true; Serial.println("Data file initialized."); } else { Serial.println("Data file NOT initialized!"); } } boolean done = false; void loop() { if (done == false) { for (int i = 0; i < 10000; i = i + 1) { Serial.println(i); dataFile.println(i); } dataFile.close(); done = true; } }