SparkFun Forums

[Chris crump]

Trying to design a custom board but when I select the ATmega328P every UART enabled component is greyed out saying the ATmega328P doesn't have a UART? First off that is not true it has one, second why are you preventing components from using a software UART. It shouldn't be this restrictive to prevent me from adding this if I elect to.
Are you just trying to push people to purchase more expensive controllers?

[Santa_Impersonator]

An engineer will probably need to chime in. However, I believe that the single UART channel is dedicated for programming the microcontroller and serial communication, through the serial-to-UART chip. I don't believe that ALC accounts for users creating "soft"-communication pins by bit-banging since that is dependent on the software development environment and the available packages.