Support for parity bits and 7 bits in standard SoftwareSerial library

[Frédéric BISSON]

Hi Everyone,

I’ve just published a small project on Github involving an Arduino Uno and a Minitel → https://github.com/Zigazou/arduinominitelchs.

Since the hardware serial port is taken by the USB connection, I have to use the SoftwareSerial library to communicate with the Minitel.

The problem is : SoftwareSerial (and other libraries doing the same thing) only supports 8 bits wide communications with no parity bit while the Minitel requires 7 bits wide communications and even parity bit.

For my project, I directly included a patched version of SoftwareSerial into my source code (completely restricted to my needs at the moment).

Can you tell me whether I should :

• create a fork of the standard SoftwareSerial library, add supports for 7 bits and parity bit, then make a pull request to incorporate it in the standard libraries (while retaining complete backward compatibility),
• create a fork, calling it SoftwareSerialExtended, add supports for 7 bits and parity bit, then make it available as a separate library.
  

Thanks,
Frédéric