title: Communicating with the Pic 16F913
body: <p>Here is my issue, it appears that all the communication lines for the PIC 16F913 reside on the same set of pins, this is convenient in that I don't have to sacrifice GPIO pins just to do comms, however the problem I'm having now is if I'm using the SPI on the chip, how can I send information to the RS232? </p>
  
  <p>The reason this issue came up, is that I just bought a CAN bus chip that communicates over SPI, and I would really like to see the data on RS232, so I can see messages. (I really don't know much about CAN yet, so who knows if this even makes sense yet).</p>
  
  <p>Here are the options I see, and maybe someone else has better ideas that I'm just simply missing.</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Somehow setup a time scheme that will switch between SPI and RS232 every time I get data, </li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>-- This doesn't seem hard and should work, but supposing I don't want to miss a message, what if a message is written while I'm writing to RS232, is it possible I'll miss it?</p>
  
  <p>2.. I can always use SPI, but then build my own comm bus over 8 of the GPIO lines, to another PIC 16F913, using only the GPIO lines and then since the RS232 lines are free on the second PIC I can simply read the data and spit it out.</p>
  
  <p>-- This one is doable but now we're wasting 2 chips, AND all the GPIO lines,</p>
  
  <p>There has to be a better way. Or is there?</p>
  
  <p>Any help is greatly appreciated.</p>
  
  <p>Update: I would like to clarify, obviously one solution is using a completely different chip (which may in fact be what I end up doing, if I can get the 18F programmed), however, I'm interested in worst case scenario, in which I am limited in resources and only have some 913's, is the way described above the only way to do it with this chip, or is there a better way?</p>