Can I make the Arduino ignore serial print

Question

I like having serial communication for debugging and testing purposes but after a while it takes away too much speed from the sketch.

Is it possible to have the Arduino ignore serial.print and serial.println throughout my code, without turning it into a comment or placing every serial printing inside for example "if(debug == true)" statements?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

If you insist on top performance, the best thing would be to use a macro for that:

#define Sprintln(a) (Serial.println(a))

Then instead of

Serial.println(F("Hello world!"));

write

Sprintln(F("Hello world!"));

etc. To deactivate the Serial printing, define the macro empty:

#define Sprintln(a) 

This will have the preprocessor remove all debugging code defined with Sprintln from your code.

(Of course, there's a huge number of variations on this theme.)

Answer 2

You could, for example, use the preprocessor to change all Serial in your code.

#ifndef ENABLE_PRINT
// disable Serial output
#define Serial SomeOtherwiseUnusedName
static class {
public:
    void begin(...) {}
    void print(...) {}
    void println(...) {}
} Serial;
#endif

Answer 3

Yet another solution is to implement a dummy Serial device. That would be a class that as HardwareSerial inherits from Stream and implements the necessary virtual member functions with dummy functions.

class NullSerial : public Stream {
public:
  virtual size_t write(uint8_t) { return (1); }
  virtual int available() { return (0); }
  virtual int read() { return (0); }
  virtual int peek() { return (0); }
  virtual void flush() {}
  ...
  void begin(unsigned long, uint8_t) {}
  void end() {}
  ...
};

NullSerial Serial;

As Serial is not defined as a weak symbol the application would need to use a Steam variable for output. And bind this to the HardwareSerial or the NullSerial.

#if defined(DEBUG)
Stream& trace = Serial;
#else
NullSerial noSerial;
Stream& trace = noSerial;
#else

#endif
...
trace.print(42);

This is not complete as all the HardwareSerial member functions (that the sketch uses) are needed but gives the general idea how to use OOP to solve the problem.

Cheers!