While the Arduino family of boards connect to your computer using a USB virtual serial port, the ATmega ones have an actual serial connection on-board.

The Arduino Due software comes with software examples for a WAV and OGG player. • 4 high-speed serial communication ports. • 70 input/output pins. • High-speed CAN interface.

Using the serial monitor that is built into the Arduino IDE (Integrated Development Environment, aka desktop software), write a program that reads in a value and echoes back the same value.

Demand for embedded programming is growing like crazy, so anyone looking for some job security might consider becoming an ace embedded programmer. It helps to have some programming experience, but ...

It would be fun to test however, and I think it wouldn’t be too hard to hit at least 115,200 bits per second coming in over serial and being pushed out over the parallel port with the current setup.

Here’s the code we promised you in the current issue of Macworld. To download a Zip archive containing this code as well as the compiled script, click here. long MINUTES = 15; // take a break ...