I've got a situation in which I want to shut off traffic on the serial port because I'm switching the MCU clock rate to one that's incompatible with the current baud rate. The problem is that I have to be able to do it in both directions and right now due to the needs of an event in a higher-priority process, yet without introducing a complicated protocol. I'm thinking in terms of generating an interrupt, specifically one interrupt if a serial character is currently being assembled, and another if it's not.

Has anybody had to do this sort of thing, i.e. ensure in hardware, that there's no serial traffic for a while? The PC seems to have one way of doing things, but I'm curious whether there's a "better" way.

Any suggestions?

RE