Arduino Python 3 Read serial port

Question

I am getting a temperature reading from my Arduino. The arduino also control 2 switches and goes through thermal cycles. What I want to do is record the temperature for every cycles. The computer need to know what "state" the arduino is in, i.e., when the cycle ends so it can generate a new graphic and store the old data. What I was thinking doing is to print in the serial an array like that: [temperature, state] The thing is that I don't really find it elegant. I'd like to know if there would be a trigger coming from the arduino that would, e.g., break a while (printing data on graphic) and produce a new one.

while True: {
  produce new graph
  while arduinoTrigger==false:{
    plot data
  }
}

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 23 '17 at 19:33

You can do this by sending a particular string from the Arduino, and on the other side, check if the received string matches, say, "state change". Otherwise, treat the string as temperature. This is assuming that the a temperature string can never be "state change", which will probably never happen.

You can have something like this in your python implementation:

while True:
    msg = ser.readline()

    if msg == 'state change':
        # switch to new graph

    else:
        data = int(msg)
        # plot data on current graph

Arduino Python 3 Read serial port

1 Answers1