Reading multiple bytes in Arduino sent using Pyserial - arduino

Question

I'm constantly sending structs of int64 via Pyserial with:
with serial.Serial(port='COM4', baudrate=115200, timeout=.1) as arduino:
value = write_read(struct.pack(">q", int_array[1][i])) #this sends signed int.64 in bytes
print(value)
the struct.pack has this shape, for example:
b'\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xef'
and the function write_read consists of:
def write_read(x):
arduino.write((x))
data = arduino.readline()
#the idea is to receive an ACK from the Arduino after 8 bytes (the full
#number)
return data
The code I'm trying to develop in arduino is the following:
void loop() {
// send data only when you receive data:
if (Serial.available() \> 0) {
// read the incoming byte:
incomingByte = Serial.read();
//read 8 bytes and create the result
r= function_to_read_8_last_bytes // or similar
// say what you got:
Serial.print("I received: ");
Serial.printlesultn(r, DEC);
Serial.write("ACK");
}
}
I'm very curious how I could do a robust "read 8 bytes" function.
Should I add some especial character in the Python part to indentify when it ends one value?
Thanks! I'll appreciate any help :)

Answer 1

Given the discussion in the comments, it's hard to receive a stream of bytes and be sure that the receiver is completely synchronized. However let's make some assumptions to ease the problem:
The serial buffer is empty when you connect your laptop to Arduino. This ensures you won't receive spurious data with no meaning. I had this problem happens a lot when the serial connection was ended abruptly by any cause.
You are not constantly sending bytes, Arduino has time to process them until the start of the new sequence.
You only send this data, so there is no need to create a higher level protocol on top of it. Bare in mind that the serial communication is almost just an hardware stack, you receive bytes with no headers.
For assumption 1 you can write a simple piece of code to consume all the spurious bytes in the serial buffer as soon as your main starts from Arudino, so this will be done everytime you connect the serial (as this is also where the power supply comes from). Something like this:
void serialFlush(){
while(Serial.available() > 0) {
char t = Serial.read();
}
}
You can send a "READY" signal back to the Python interface, so that the program knows you are ready to receive data.
Going on with the solution you can implement an easy CRC in python, an additional byte which contains a XOR of all the previous bytes, and you check that in Arduino upon reception complete.
def xor_reduce_long_int(li):
res = 0;
for i in range(8):
mask = (0xFF)<<(i*8)
print(hex(mask))
masked = (li&mask)>>(i*8)
res ^= masked
return res
with serial.Serial(port='COM4', baudrate=115200, timeout=.1) as arduino:
crc=xor_reduce_long_int(int_array[1][i])
value = write_read(struct.pack(">qc", int_array[1][i],crc)) #this sends signed int.64 in bytes
print(value)
And with Arduino I would read 8 bytes when they are available and put them into an unsigned char buffer. I would then define a union that alias such buffer to interpret it as long long int.
typedef struct long_int_CRC
{
union
{
unsigned char bytes[8];
long int data;
};
unsigned char CRC;
}data_T;
// .. Later in main
data_T = received_data;
int received_bytes=0
unsigned char my_CRC = 0;
unsigned char rec_byte= 0;
while( received_bytes < 8 )
{
if(Serial.available() )
{
// Get the byte
rec_byte = Serial.read()
// Store the byte and calc CRC
received_data.bytes[received_bytes] = rec_byte;
my_CRC ^= rec_byte;
// Increment counter for next byte
received_bytes++;
}
}
// Reception complete, check CRC
unsigned char rec_CRC;
if(Serial.available() )
{
rec_CRC = Serial.read()
}
if( my_CRC != rec_CRC )
{
// Something was wrong!
}
// Now access your data as a long int
Serial.print("I received: ");
Serial.printlesultn(received_data.data, DEC);
Serial.write("ACK");