Question

I have an infrared camera/tracker with which I am communicating via the serial port. I’m using the pyserial module to do this at the moment. The camera updates the position of a tracked object at the rate of 60 Hz. In order to get the position of the tracked object I execute one pyserial.write() and then listen for an incoming reply with pyserial.read(serialObj.inWaiting()). Once the reply/position has been received the while loop is reentered and so on. My question has to do with the reliability and speed of this approach. I need the position to be gotten by the computer at the rate of at least 60Hz (and the position will then be sent via UDP to a real-time OS). Is this something that Pyserial/Python are capable of or should I look into alternative C-based approaches?

Thanks,
Luke

Answer 1

Python should keep up fine, but the best thing to do is make sure you monitor how many reads per second you are getting. Count how many times the read completed each second, and if this number is too low, write to a performance log or similar. You should also consider decoupling the I/O part from the rest of your python program (if there is one) as pyserial read calls are blocking.