Hello All,
As I understand it, AVR MCU's have inbuilt serial support. I am unable to understand the purpose of the FastSerial library which is used by the OSD and the APM. Serial will work at the speed set using the baud rate. So what is fast here when we use this library? What is advantage if we use this library rather than the standard API's of arduino?
Thanks
Ravi
Replies
I believe the standard serial library from Arduino is (or at least was) blocking. so if you sent a bunch of bytes, your cpu would not be able to do other tasks until all bytes were sent. The FastSerial library can send the bytes in the background.
The only qualification is that I believe in Arduino 1.0 that they've enhanced the standard serial library to also be non-blocking so in the medium term we might be able to switch back to the standard library.
Hi Randy, do you happen to know if the current Serial library for arduino is still blocking MCU for the time of serial communication, or has it been fixed? I need to compile something for a Leonardo board and fast serial doesn't support it, but I still need non-blocking serial communication.
Thank you,
Artem,
I haven't been keeping up with Arduino so I'm not sure if it's still blocking or not. Sorry!