Hi Hans
On Wed, 2012-03-07 at 13:06 -0500, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
I was doing some comport profiling using an Arduino and Firmata. I noticed that at the default poll time of 1ms, that there were many fruitless calls to comport_tick() before any bytes where read. And that the bytes are always read and written in clusters, no matter the poll time.
I think your numbers clearly suggest that lowering the polling rate does no harm. I didn't do any serious testing, but I couldn't detect any additional jitter due to this change. And since the polling time can be adjusted with a message, I'd say it makes sense to leave the optimized 10ms as the default.
As a quick test, I toggled on and off the LED 13 on the arduino board with a [metro 8]. By manually weaving the board as quickly as possible, I could something like the following pattern drawn by the LED:
#### ###### ###### ##### ##### ###### ######
and this pattern didn't change noticeably when switching between 1ms and 10ms polling time.
Roman