19.5 USART Initialization
The USART has to be initialized before any communication can take place. The initialization pro-
cess normally consists of setting the baud rate, setting frame format and enabling the
Transmitter or the Receiver depending on the usage. For interrupt driven USART operation, the
Global Interrupt Flag should be cleared (and interrupts globally disabled) when doing the
initialization.
Before doing a re-initialization with changed baud rate or frame format, be sure that there are no
ongoing transmissions during the period the registers are changed. The TXCn Flag can be used
to check that the Transmitter has completed all transfers, and the RXC Flag can be used to
check that there are no unread data in the receive buffer. Note that the TXCn Flag must be
cleared before each transmission (before UDRn is written) if it is used for this purpose.
The following simple USART initialization code examples show one assembly and one C func-
tion that are equal in functionality. The examples assume asynchronous operation using polling
(no interrupts enabled) and a fixed frame format. The baud rate is given as a function parameter.
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ATmega48/88/168
2545M–AVR–09/07
ATMEL [ ATMEL ]
