Async serial communication/threads sharing data

[Jean-Paul Calderone]

On Sat, 21 Mar 2009 13:52:21 -0700 (PDT), Nick Timkovich <prometheus235 at gmail.com> wrote:
>I've been working on a program that will talk to an embedded device
>over the serial port, using some basic binary communications with
>messages 4-10 bytes long or so.  Most of the nuts and bolts problems
>I've been able to solve, and have learned a little about the threading
>library to avoid blocking all action while waiting for responses
>(which can take 50 ms to 10 s).  Ultimately, this program will test
>the device on the COM port by sending it messages and collecting
>responses for 10k-100k cycles; a cycle being:
> 1. tell it to switch a relay,
> 2. get it's response from the event,
> 3. ask it for some measurements,
> 4. get measurements,
> 5. repeat.
>Later I would like to develop a GUI as well, but not a big issue now
>(another reason to use threads? not sure).

Twisted includes serial port support and will let you integrate with a
GUI toolkit.  Since Twisted encourages you to write programs which deal
with things asynchronously in a single thread, if you use it, your
concerns about data exchange, locking, and timing should be addressed
as a simple consequence of your overall program structure.

Jean-Paul