Efficient handling of fast, real-time hex data

[Gregory Ewing]

jladasky at itu.edu wrote:
> So, how can I take the byte sequence <0x01 0x02 0x03 0x04 0x05 0x06 \n> that
> Serial.readline() returns to me,

Using readline() to read binary data doesn't sound like
a good idea -- what happens if one of the data bytes
happens to be 0x0a?

If you're going binary, it would be better to ditch the
newlines and read a fixed number of bytes each time.

Regarding speed, if struct.unpack or numpy isn't fast
enough, you may need to deal with the data in bigger
chunks.

Although if you're not doing a huge amount of processing
with them, I'd expect it to be plenty fast enough.
I just did a quick test, and I was able to unpack
about 700,000 random 6-byte strings per second on
a 2.8GHz Xeon.

-- 
Greg