Sending constant int from Arduino to PC causes error

Question

I am using Arduino Uno Rev 3, and according to this link we can achieve 2000000 baud rate.

This problem can be easily repeated by the following code:

void setup() {
 Serial.begin(2000000);
}
void loop() {
 int val = 234;
 Serial.println(val);
}

I am using the serial-USB cable. To read the data, I used Python pyserial (< 20 lines of code including empty lines and import lines):

import serial
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
LEN = 10000
data = []
ser = serial.Serial('COM3', baudrate=2000000)
for i in range(LEN):
 try:
 data.append(int(ser.readline()))
 except:
 pass
ser.close()
# %% Plot data
plt.figure(figsize=(6, 4))
plt.plot(data)
plt.savefig('data.png')

Here is what I got:

Plot of data

Edit below

Chris mentioned a good point that it might be the high baud rate of 2,000,000 causing the instability. I did think about that when I first ran into this, but then I did a little trick: adding a sinusoid into the constant. If I do that, the weird spiking goes away! I think it indicate that this is not a high baud rate issue... Is it?

Code:

void setup() {
 Serial.begin(2000000);
}
void loop() {
 int val = 234;
 val += int(512 * (sin(float(millis()) * 0.01) + 1)) * 0.1;
 Serial.println(val);
}

Output:

Output

• Chris Stratton: Your link overlooks many potential issues, such as buffer management in the USB converter. Just because the hardware UARTs can both divide a 16 MHz clock by 8, doesn't mean you can actually move bulk data at that rate reliably, or flush it through the USB backhaul before more comes in. Try capturing the actual data received.
• Chris Stratton: Setting a high baud rate isn't necessarily going to move your data any faster anyway - if the bottleneck is elsewhere, it may just make it less reliable. For maximum throughput, look at a Leonardo-style board (or better yet, one of the ARM-based ones) as there, the baud rate is ignored and the USB will simply move the data as fast as the embedded processor can keep up with.
• Chris Stratton: Please merge your two questions of today on this topic by editing all the content into one and deleting the other.
• Shawn Wang: @ChrisStratton I thought about that too, but then if I do a little trick and add a sinusoid into it, it will transfer all right! I will update the OP now to show that.
• Chris Stratton: You are probably just delaying things with the time consuming calculation, allowing time for something to catch up. Your overall problem is that your baud rate is unreliably high for one or more of the pieces in the chain.