What is the best delay to use between characters sent to the serial port

Question

I have an Arduino Uno. It's role is to echo back what it receives.
But if I send it a stream of ascii characters it starts to error after the first one. Occasionally it gets the second character correct but often not.

If I delay each character then it works ok. I couldn't see this limitation mentioned in the SoftwareSerial library: https://www.arduino.cc/en/Reference/SoftwareSerial

The Arduino is running the following code:

#define BT_RX_PIN 16 // A2
#define BT_TX_PIN 17 // A3
#include <SoftwareSerial.h>
SoftwareSerial OtherSerial(BT_RX_PIN, BT_TX_PIN);

void setup()
{
  Serial.begin(9600);  // not used
  OtherSerial.begin(9600);
}

void loop()
{
  if (OtherSerial.available()) {
    char value = OtherSerial.read();
    String stri = "Received: ";
    stri += value;
    OtherSerial.println(stri);
  }
}

The limitations do say "If using multiple software serial ports, only one can receive data at a time.". I don't have multiple software serial ports though I do have an instance of the "normal" serial port but I'm not sending any data to it... but perhaps even just initialising it is enough to disrupt seamless communication with the SoftwareSerial port?

Using the following test code for serial communication from a Raspberry Pi (using logic level conversion to go from 5V -> 3.3V and visa versa):

import time

def write(msg, delay):
  for char in msg:
    with open("/dev/ttyAMA0", "w") as f:
      f.write(char)
      time.sleep(delay)

write("hello", 0.01)

I got the following results (repeated 10 times at each delay time and averaged):

Delay (ms)   |   Success rate
10           |   100 %
9            |   100 %
8            |     0 %
5            |     0 %
1            |     0 %

A delay of 9 ms between each character means the communication rate falls from ~ 960 characters per second (9600 baud / 10 bits per 7 bit character) to ~ 100 characters per second (1 / (1 / 960 characters per second + 9ms)). Is this right? Perhaps I'm doing something else wrong / set it up wrong in software / hardware?

Answer 1

SoftwareSerial has a considerable overhead. It can often send at 115200 successfully but 9600 is about its limit for receiving, and you're trying both send and receive. In addition, for each character your code receives, it transmits considerably more than that 1 character (11 characters, by my count). It isn't too surprising that it would fall behind. You will need to either reduce the size of what you echo or reduce the rate at which you send characters to it (which is what you accomplished with your delay) so that the transmission (echo) rate can keep up.

Update:

The OP reports success with continuous reception by, and transmission from, the Arduino at 57600 baud (but not at the same time). The transmission rate would be consistent with my experience transmitting at 115200 baud (blindly and for short bursts, to reconfigure ESP8266-01s that were shipped with a preset 115200 rate.

Answer 2

Simply put, a serial port implemented in software requires the program to sample the input pin fast enough to detect every transition. To satisfy the Nyquist frequency rate we need the program to sample the data twice as fast as we expect the data to change.

A serial port implemented in hardware might only need to be sampled at 1/16 this rate assuming the data size is 8 bits.

Your program implements a serial port in software which is admirably keeping up with the received data. However, when you tell the program to send the message "Received" plus the string that was received, the program stops looking at the serial input pin long enough for data to go missing.

By far the easiest solution would be to use a hardware implemented serial port. If this is not possible consider approaching the problem using interrupts. However, while a powerful programming tool, interrupts can be difficult to implement and hard to debug.