The need often arises to make use of a serial port in connection with a microcontroller that does not have a hardware UART on-chip. Aside from the obvious cases where the microcontroller application intrinsically requires RS-232 communications to achieve its purpose, a serial output may often be a simple and convenient method of providing detailed diagnostic information to the outside world while using only a single I/O port pin. In many cases, the solution may be to implement the UART function in software. The routines included here demonstrate a method to add such a function to a microcontroller without the benefit of a hardware UART.