Serial control

[javi-el-largo]

Hi. Browsing the manual I’ve seen it’s possible to control the receiver via USB serial. I think it’s very interesting, because I think it would be possible to make an external contrller with an MCU and a few pushbuttons to quickly set the most common settings (e.g. volume, step, bandwidth, mode, etc.) without the necessity of using the encoder.

This is my question:
Can I attach the UART RX-TX pins of another microcontroller (let’s say an Arduino or an ESP) directly to the ESP32 UART TX-RX pins to send the commands, or the serial communication must be exclusively via USB?

Thanks in advance.

[max-arnold]

I never tried anything like that on ESP32, so please do not consider my answer to be 100% correct.

The firmware uses the built-in USB Serial/JTAG interface to receive commands and send responses, so I guess you'll need a USB host implementation to control it over USB.

Of course, it is possible to use any of the three UART controllers directly (available in the ESP32-S3 module), but then you'll have to modify the firmware.

I plan to add CAT protocol support later this year, and I hope to make it work over bluetooth. That might be another option for you.

See the following links as well

• New app to control ATS mini Radio running this firmware #111
• Mini-Radio Control GUI #101
• https://ats-mini-controller.vercel.app/

[javi-el-largo]

Thank you.