alt Hacker NewsJust before arduino became a thing I had an idea to create a device that could read your your text messages by tapping out morse code on your skin somewhere, like your hip or arm.
It would never be able to keep up with modern levels of connectivity, but at the time I thought the bit rate might be high enough to be interesting.
But by the time arduino landed I was more interested in visual information radiators. I soured on the whole idea when I discovered that flow control hardware wasn't on any of these boards. Made it feel very much like sticks and rocks.
When I was making an EEPROM programmer with an arduino, I decided to pick up the datasheet, ditch the arduino builtin stuff (I made a separate "board" which stripped the serial code out, and the time functions, because I didn't need them and they fired an interrupt needlessly wasting resources for me), and write your own interrupts for serial. It's obviously more work, but you get to implement whatever you want. You can set up an interrupt for the flow control line. The arduino libraries are shockingly inefficient and limited sometimes.
Or you could do software flow control and use XON and XOFF for a simpler but, imo, clunkier solution