On schematic on this page: https://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/BuiltInExamples/MultiSerialMega The current connections connections are wrong: SERIAL ENABLED DEVICE | Arduino Mega -|- RX|RX1 TX|TX1 They should be as follows: SERIAL ENABLED DEVICE | Arduino Mega -|- RX|TX1 TX|RX1 The reason is because "RX" stands for "receive" and "TX" for "transmit". So the receiver pin must be connected to the transmitter pin, and vice versa.