ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Asynchronous serial communication

Okay, so imagine you have two friends, let's call them Friend A and Friend B, and you want to send secret messages between them. You can use a special way of talking called "asynchronous serial communication" to send these messages.

Here's how it works: you grab a piece of paper and write down your message to Friend A, then you give the paper to someone who will deliver it to Friend A. Friend A reads the message and writes a response back on a new piece of paper, which they give to someone else to deliver back to you.

This is kind of like how asynchronous serial communication works in computers. Instead of using paper, we use electrical signals.

When Friend A sends a message, they use a special signal called the "start bit" to tell us that they are about to start sending a message. Then, they send a stream of electrical signals that represent their message. Each electrical signal represents a piece of the message, like a letter or a number.

When they're done sending the message, they use a signal called the "stop bit" to tell us they're finished. This way, we know that everything we just received was a single message.

Just like when passing messages on paper, we can't know for sure that the message was received correctly until Friend B writes back to confirm that they understood the message. In computers, we do this by sending a special signal called an "acknowledge" bit after receiving each message.

And that's how asynchronous serial communication works! It's a way for computers to send and receive messages between each other using electrical signals, kind of like passing notes between friends!