Serial Port Polling and Data handling

I am trying to read from several serial ports from sensors through microcontrollers. Each serial port will receive more than 2000 measurements (each measurement is 7 bytes, all in hex). And they are firing at the same time. Right now I am polling from 4 serial ports. Also, I translate each measurement into String and append it to a Stringbuilder. When I finish receiving data, they will be ouput in to a file. The problem is the CPU consumption is very high, ranging from 80% to 100%.

I went though some articles and put Thread.Sleep(100) at the end. It reduces CPU time when there is no data coming. I also put Thread.Sleep at the end of each polling when the BytesToRead is smaller than 100. It only helps to a certain extent.

Can someone suggest a solution to poll from serial port and handle data that I get? Maybe appending every time I get something causes the problem?

//I use separate threads for all sensors
private void SensorThread(SerialPort mySerialPort, int bytesPerMeasurement, TextBox textBox,     StringBuilder data)
    {
        textBox.BeginInvoke(new MethodInvoker(delegate() { textBox.Text = ""; }));

        int bytesRead;
        int t;
        Byte[] dataIn;

        while (mySerialPort.IsOpen)
        {
            try
            {
                if (mySerialPort.BytesToRead != 0)
                {
                  //trying to read a fix number of bytes
                    bytesRead = 0;
                    t = 0;
                    dataIn = new Byte[bytesPerMeasurement];
                    t = mySerialPort.Read(dataIn, 0, bytesPerMeasurement);
                    bytesRead += t;
                    while (bytesRead != bytesPerMeasurement)
                    {
                        t = mySerialPort.Read(dataIn, bytesRead, bytesPerMeasurement - bytesRead);
                        bytesRead += t;
                    }
                    //convert them into hex string
                    StringBuilder s = new StringBuilder();
                    foreach (Byte b in dataIn) { s.Append(b.ToString("X") + ","); }
                    var line = s.ToString();

                                            var lineString = string.Format("{0}  ----          {2}",
                                                      line,
                                                    mySerialPort.BytesToRead);
                    data.Append(lineString + "\r\n");//append a measurement to a huge Stringbuilder...Need a solution for this.

                    ////use delegate to change UI thread...
                    textBox.BeginInvoke(new MethodInvoker(delegate() { textBox.Text = line; }));

                    if (mySerialPort.BytesToRead <= 100) { Thread.Sleep(100); }
                }
            else{Thread.Sleep(100);}

            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {
                //MessageBox.Show(ex.ToString());
            }
        }


    }

this is not a good way to do it, it far better to work on the DataReceived event.

basically with serial ports there's a 3 stage process that works well.

Receiving the Data from the serial port
Waiting till you have a relevant chunk of data
Interpreting the data

so something like

class DataCollector
{
    private readonly Action<List<byte>> _processMeasurement;
    private readonly string _port;
    private SerialPort _serialPort;
    private const int SizeOfMeasurement = 4;
    List<byte> Data = new List<byte>();

    public DataCollector(string port, Action<List<byte>> processMeasurement)
    {
        _processMeasurement = processMeasurement;
        _serialPort = new SerialPort(port);
        _serialPort.DataReceived +=SerialPortDataReceived;
    }

    private void SerialPortDataReceived(object sender, SerialDataReceivedEventArgs e)
    {
        while(_serialPort.BytesToRead > 0)
        {
           var count = _serialPort.BytesToRead;
           var bytes = new byte[count];
           _serialPort.Read(bytes, 0, count);
           AddBytes(bytes);
        }
    }

    private void AddBytes(byte[] bytes)
    {
        Data.AddRange(bytes);
        while(Data.Count > SizeOfMeasurement)            
        {
            var measurementData = Data.GetRange(0, SizeOfMeasurement);
            Data.RemoveRange(0, SizeOfMeasurement);
            if (_processMeasurement != null) _processMeasurement(measurementData);
        }

    }
}

Note: Add Bytes keeps collecting data till you have enough to count as a measurement, or if you get a burst of data, splits it up into seperate measurements.... so you can get 1 byte one time, 2 the next, and 1 more the next, and it will then take that an turn it into a measurement. Most of the time if your micro sends it in a burst, it will come in as one, but sometimes it will get split into 2.

then somewhere you can do

var collector = new DataCollector("COM1", ProcessMeasurement);

and

  private void ProcessMeasurement(List<byte> bytes)
            {
                // this will get called for every measurement, so then
                // put stuff into a text box.... or do whatever
            }

First of all consider reading Using Stopwatches and Timers in .NET. You can break down any performance issue with this and tell exactly which part of Your code is causing the problem.

Use SerialPort.DataReceived Event to trigger data receiving process.

Separate receiving process and data manipulation process. Store Your data first then process.

Do not edit UI from reading loop.

I guess what you should be doing is adding an event handler to process incoming data:

mySerialPort.DataReceived += new SerialDataReceivedEventHandler(mySerialPort_DataReceived);

This eliminates the need to run a separate thread for each serial port you listen to. Also, each DataReceived handler will be called precisely when there is data available and will consume only as much CPU time as is necessary to process the data, then yield to the application/OS.

If that doesn't solve the CPU usage problem, it means you're doing too much processing. But unless you've got some very fast serial ports I can't imagine the code you've got there will pose a problem.

Serial Port Polling and Data handling

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