to increase the reading and writing/printing speed of data from Arduino Nano to Raspberry Pi 3B+

Question

In my project, I have to read the input pin number(send by RPi), where 8 sensors are attached to Arduino Nano, after reading Arduino Nano send the real-time values of all sensors through serial USB communication. All is fine, but my problem is that I need to speed up the sending of data since it takes to long to read from Rasberry pi. I put the delay of 70 milliseconds but if I try to reduce more than that, I encounter a problem i.e data overwrites. My baud rate is 115200. Kindly help me with the code to make it fast.

int analogInputPin;
float voltage;
void setup() {
 // initialize serial communications at 9600 bps:
 Serial.begin(115200);
}
void loop() {
 // if any data on the serial port are available
 // read it and try to update the analogInputPin
 // based on the number that was read on the serial 
 if (Serial.available() > 0) {
 analogInputPin = Serial.parseInt();
 }
 // read the analog value:
 int analogInputPinValue = analogRead(analogInputPin);
 voltage=(5./1023.)*analogInputPinValue;
 // print the results to the serial port:
 // the output should have the following form: INPUTPIN:VALUE
 // followed by a newline character
 Serial.print(analogInputPin);
 Serial.print(":");
 Serial.print(voltage);
 Serial.println("");
 // wait 50 milliseconds before the next loop
 delay(50);
}

• Mikael Patel: Hint: Look at the source code for Serial.parseInt(). Consider reading to a buffer instead.
• Majenko: Don't use parseInt. Ever. It's rancid. Read serial properly : majenko.co.uk/blog/reading-serial-arduino

Answer 1

parseInt reads digits and stops after a non-digit characters occurs or the function times out because no next characters arrives. The timeout is at default 1 second. So this is where you loose time.

Simplest solution for your code is to send some non-digit character after the number sent from Raspberry. This will terminate parseInt immediately. Usual is to send a new line character. It will separate the numbers nice if you debug the communication with prints to serial terminal.

Not a very good option, but I mention it, is to set the timeout of blocking read functions like the parseInt to a smaller time with Serial.setTimeout(ms).

To really speed up the communication you would send the numbers in binary form and not as text like you do now.