Arduino Serial communication output - serial-port

Question

I have 2 Arduinos Leonardo and I want them to communicate itself, so I did the following code:
void setup() {
Serial.begin(9600);
Serial1.begin(9600);
}
void loop() {
String outMessage = ""; // String to hold input
while (Serial.available() > 0) { // check if at least 1 char is available
char inChar = Serial.read();
outMessage.concat(inChar); // add inChar to outMessage
}
if (outMessage != "") {
Serial.println("Sent: " + outMessage); // View Arduino 1 in Serial Monitor 1
Serial1.print(outMessage); // Send to Arduino 2
}
while (Serial1.available() > 0) {
Serial.print("Received: "); // View Arduino 1 in Serial Monitor 2
Serial.print(Serial1.read()); // Received from Arduino 1
Serial.println();
}
}
I want to send a message from Arduino 1, print in Serial Monitor and send via TX1 to Arduino 2 and vice-versa. The problem is that I don't receive what I was expecting. For instance if I type test:
Arduino 1:
Sent: test
Arduino 2:
Received: t
Received: e
Received: s
Received: t
I also tryed to do the receiving side like the sending side and use Serial.write but with no sucess.
Is there a easier way to do that or to fix it?
Thanks

Answer 1

Has mentioned by Hans, you need a protocol.
This is what I use to consider a message in Arduino to be a complete message:
char inData[10];
int index;
boolean started = false;
boolean ended = false;
String message =("I am Arduino 1 and I am ready");
void setup(){
Serial.begin(9600);
Serial.println(message);
}
void loop()
{
while(Serial.available() > 0)
{
char aChar = Serial.read();
if(aChar == '>')
{
started = true;
index = 0;
inData[index] = '\0';
}
else if(aChar == '<')
{
ended = true;
}
else if(started)
{
inData[index] = aChar;
index++;
inData[index] = '\0';
}
}
if(started && ended)
{
int inInt = atoi(inData);
Serial.println(inInt);
}
// Get ready for the next time
started = false;
ended = false;
index = 0;
inData[index] = '\0';
}
So, basically a message is considered completed only if it is between the special characters ><, like this: >message<. Then you can do the same on reading.

Answer 2

It does not have to be too complicated. If you look carefully at your last whlie-loop you can see that the software does not get a chance to read more than one character each time it passes through the loop. So that is what you get: one character at a time.
In your first while-loop you did better: you collected all the incoming letters until nothing was available and then sent them all at once. So if you make your last loop look more like the first one, you'll get a better result.

Answer 3

As mentioned a protocol to frame messages is needed between devices. A quick way to do this is to use Bill Porter's EasyTransfer library which does exactly what you are trying to do, over either UART or I2C. It has several examples.

Answer 4

Serial.read() reads only one byte every time you use it. A simple solution would be to store each byte on a char array while Serial.available>0 and then print the String with the whole message that was sent.
char message[40];
int count = 0;
while(Serial.available()>0){
message[count++] = Serial.read();
}
Serial.println(message);