Well, I've been strugling for the last 4 days with this SerialPort control in C# with no satisfactory results. Let me explain:
I have a device (Arduino UNO Board) that comunicates with a c# prog which simulates a scale (simple request/response pattern), the device sends a command sequence consisting of 3 bytes (asking for a weigh): CHR(27)+P+CHR(13) so the simulator responds with a simulated weight (I have sorted out how the device catches and parses this weight so this is not longer of the problem).
Using the DataReceive event seems I'm loosing data using Serialport.Read() so I wasted this approach so far.
The simulator HAVE TO BE ALWAYS listening for the said seq. of bytes and HAVE TO HAVE a GUI. I understand that for this I must use a Thread in order to prevent the GUI is locked (perhaps a backgroundworker?) and a sort of buffer which is shared between (now) this 2 threads and prevent the threads read/write at the same time to the buffer (do I need a state machine?) (I ask for help on this since I don't know if this is a good approach or my assumptions are wrong or if theres is a more easy way to solve this) so I'm asking for advice and (with lot of luck) code fragments or if you've faced to develop a similar app how you solved it.
I can provide the code I've done so far if necesary to clarify further more. Hope you can shed a light on this.
Thanks in advance.
UPDATE 1
This is the code i have so far:
ConcurrentQueue<byte> queue = new ConcurrentQueue<byte>();
....
private void backgroundWorker_DoWork(object sender, DoWorkEventArgs e)
{
bool listening = true;
while(listening)
{
if(serialPort.BytesToRead > 0)
{
byte b = (byte)serialPort.ReadByte();
queue.Enqueue(b);
}
}
}
So since a command have to end with character 13 (CR in ASCII):
public string GetCommand()
{
string ret = "";
byte[] ba = new byte[1];
byte b = (byte)' ';
while(b!=13)
{
if(queue.TryDequeue(out b))
{
ba[0] = b;
ret += ASCIIEncoding.ASCII.GetString([ba]);
}
}
return ret;
}
In order to test this GetCommand() method I call it from the main ui thread within a buton_click event but it hangs the app, do i need to create another thread to call GetCommand() ?
This is ok for small amount of data. But if the data is bigger like if you are passing some http information, then the queue size may not be sufficient. So I think you should use a non-blocking type of architecture.
See this answer for how to implement the sending side.
For the reading side use a dedicated thread, in that thread read a message from the port, queue it up in a suitable concurrent data structure (e.g. a ConcurrentQueue) and immediately loop back to wait for the next input from the serial port.
Consume the input from the queue on a separate thread.
There may be more efficient ways but this one is easy to implement and foolproof.
Related
Multithread programming is a new concept for me. I’ve done a bunch of reading and even with many examples, I just can’t seem to figure it out. I'm new to C# and programming.
I have a winform project with lots of custom controls I’ve imported and will utilize many tcpclients. I’m trying to get each control to be hosted on it’s own separate thread. Right now, I’m trying to get 1 control to behave appropriately with it’s own thread.
I'll show you what I have and then follow up with some questions regarding guidance.
string asyncServerHolder; // gets the server name from a text_changed event
int asyncPortHolder; // gets the port # from a text_changed event
TcpClient wifiClient = new TcpClient();
private void btnStart_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
... // variable initialization, etc.
... // XML setup, http POST setup.
send(postString + XMLString); // Content to send.
}
private void send(string msg)
{
AsyncCallback callBack = new AsyncCallback(ContentDownload);
wifiClient.BeginConnect(asyncServerHolder, asyncPortHolder, callBack, wifiClient);
wifiClient.Client.Send(System.Text.Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(msg));
}
private void ContentDownload(IAsyncResult result)
{
if (wifiClient.Connected)
{
string response4 = "Connected!!"; //debug msg
byte[] buff = new byte[1024];
int i = wifiClient.Client.Receive(buff);
do
{
response1 = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetString(buff, 0, i);
} while (response1.Length == 0);
response2 = response1.Substring(9, 3); // pick out status code to be displayed after
wifiClient.Client.Dispose();
wifiClient.Close();
}
}
If you're knowledgeable about this, I bet you see lots of problems above. As it stands right now, I always get an exception one my first iteration of running this sequence:
"A request to send or receive data was disallowed because the socket is not connected and (when sending on a datagram socket using a sendto call) no address was supplied"
Why is this? I have confirmed that my asyncServerHolder and my asyncPortHolder are correct. My second iteration of attempting allowed me to see response4 = "Connected!!" but I get a null response on response1.
Eventually I'd like to substitute in my user controls which I have in a List. I'd just like to gracefully connect, send my msg, receive my response and then allow my form to notify me from that particular control which plays host to that tcp client. My next step would be link up many controls.
Some questions:
1) Do I need more TCP clients? Should they be in a list and be the # of controls I have enabled at that time of btnStart_Click?
2) My controls are on my GUI, does that mean I need to invoke if I'm interacting with them?
3) I see many examples using static methods with this context. Why is this?
Thanks in advance. All criticism is welcome, feel free to be harsh!
BeginConnect returns immediately. Probably, no connection has been established yet when Send runs. Make sure that you use the connection only after having connected.
if (wifiClient.Connected) and what if !Connected? You just do nothing. That's not a valid error recovery strategy. Remove this if entirely.
In your read loop you destroy the previously read contents on each iteration. In fact, you can't split up an UTF8 encoded string at all and decode the parts separately. Read all bytes into some buffer and only when you have received everything, decode the bytes to a string.
wifiClient.Client.Dispose();
wifiClient.Close();
Superstitious dispose pattern. wifiClient.Dispose(); is the canonical way to release everything.
I didn't quite understand what "controls" you are talking about. A socket is not a control. UI controls are single-threaded. Only access them on the UI thread.
Do I need more TCP clients?
You need one for each connection.
Probably, you should use await for all blocking operations. There are wrapper libraries that make the socket APIs usable with await.
I am pretty new to coding with some experience in ASM and C for PIC. I am still learning high level programming with C#.
Question
I have a Serial port data reception and processing program in C#. To avoid losing data and knowing when it was coming, I set a DataReceived event and loop into the handling method until there were no more bytes to read.
When I attempted this, the loop continued endlessly and blocked my program from other tasks (such as processing the retrieved data) when I continuously received data.
I read about threading in C#, I created a thread that constantly checks for SerialPort.Bytes2Read property so it will know when to retrieve available data.
I created a second thread that can process data while new data is still being read. If bytes have been read and ReadSerial() has more bytes to read and the timeout (restarted every time a new byte is read from the serial) they can still be processed and the frames assembled via a method named DataProcessing() which reads from the same variable being filled by ReadSerial().
This gave me the desired results, but I noticed that with my solution (both ReadSerial() and DataProcessing() threads alive), CPU Usage was skyrocketed all the way to 100%!
How do you approach this problem without causing such high CPU usage?
public static void ReadSerial() //Method that handles Serial Reception
{
while (KeepAlive) // Bool variable used to keep alive the thread. Turned to false
{ // when the program ends.
if (Port.BytesToRead != 0)
{
for (int i = 0; i < 5000; i++)
{
/* I Don't know any other way to
implement a timeout to wait for
additional characters so i took what
i knew from PIC Serial Data Handling. */
if (Port.BytesToRead != 0)
{
RxList.Add(Convert.ToByte(Port.ReadByte()));
i = 0;
if (RxList.Count > 20) // In case the method is stuck still reading
BufferReady = true; // signal the Data Processing thread to
} // work with that chunk of data.
BufferReady = true; // signals the DataProcessing Method to work
} // with the current data in RxList.
}
}
}
I can not understand completely what you are meaning with the "DataReceived" and the "loop". I am also working a lot with Serial Ports as well as other interfaces. In my application I am attaching to the DataReceived Event and also reading based on the Bytes to read, but I dont use a loop there:
int bytesToRead = this._port.BytesToRead;
var data = new byte[bytesToRead];
this._port.BaseStream.Read(data , 0, bytesToRead);
If you are using a loop to read the bytes I recommend something like:
System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(...);
Otherwise the Thread you are using to read the bytes is busy all the time. And this will lead to the fact that other threads cannot be processed or your CPU is at 100%.
But I think you don't have to use a loop for polling for the data if you are using the DataReceived event. If my undertanding is not correct or you need further information please ask.
I'm new to this forum, and I have a question that has been bothering me for a while.
My setup is a serial enabled character display connected to my pc with a usb/uart converter. I'm transmitting bytes to the display via the serialPort class in a separate write buffer thread in a C++ style:
private void transmitThread(){
while(threadAlive){
if(q.Count > 0){ // Queue not empty
byte[] b = q.Dequeue();
s.Write(b,0,b.Length);
System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(100);
}
else{ // Queue empty
System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(10);
}
}
}
Assuming the serial port is already opened, this works perfectly and transmits all the data to the display. There are though no exception handling at all in this snippet. Therefore I was looking into implementing a typical C# feature, the 'using' statement and only opening the port when needed, like so:
private void transmitThread(){
while(threadAlive){
if(q.Count > 0){ // Queue not empty
byte[] b = q.Dequeue();
using(s){ //using the serialPort
s.Open();
s.Write(b,0,b.Length);
s.Close();
}
System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(100);
}
else{ // Queue empty
System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(10);
}
}
}
The problem with this function is, that it only transmits a random amount of the data, typically about one third of the byte-array of 80 bytes. I have tried different priority settings of the thread, but nothing changes.
Am I missing something important, or do I simply close the port too fast after a transmit request?
I hope you can help me. Thanks :)
No, that was a Really Bad Idea. The things that go wrong, roughly in the order you'll encounter them:
the serial port driver discards any bytes left in the transmit buffer that were not yet transmitted when you close the port. Which is what you are seeing now.
the MSDN article for SerialPort.Close() warns that you must "wait a while" before opening the port again. There's an internal worker thread that needs to shut down. The amount of time you have to wait is not specified and is variable, depending on machine load.
closing a port allows another program to grab the port and open it. Serial ports cannot be shared, your program will fail when you try to open it again.
Serial ports were simply not designed to be opened and closed on-the-fly. Only open it at the start of your program, close it when it ends. Not calling Close() at all is quite acceptable and avoids a deadlock scenario.
I think you're missing the point of the using block. A typical using block will look like this:
using (var resource = new SomeResource())
{
resource.DoSomething();
}
The opening happens at the very beginning. Typically as part of the constructor. But sometimes on the first line of the using block.
But the big red flag I see is that the closing happens automatically. You don't need the .Close() call.
If the successful operation of your serial device is dependent on the calls to Thread.Sleep then perhaps the thread is being interrupted at some point, sufficient to make the data transmission out of sync with the device. There would most likely be ways to solve this but the first thing I would do is try to use the .NET SerialPort class instead. The Write method is very similar to what you want to do, and there are C++ code examples in those articles.
I have run into an issue with the slow C# start-up time causing UDP packets to drop initially. Below, I is what I have done to mitigate this start-up delay. I essentially wait an additional 10ms between the first two packet transmissions. This fixes the initial drops at least on my machine. My concern is that a slower machine may need a longer delay than this.
private void FlushPacketsToNetwork()
{
MemoryStream packetStream = new MemoryStream();
while (packetQ.Count != 0)
{
byte[] packetBytes = packetQ.Dequeue().ToArray();
packetStream.Write(packetBytes, 0, packetBytes.Length);
}
byte[] txArray = packetStream.ToArray();
udpSocket.Send(txArray);
txCount++;
ExecuteStartupDelay();
}
// socket takes too long to transmit unless I give it some time to "warm up"
private void ExecuteStartupDelay()
{
if (txCount < 3)
{
timer.SpinWait(10e-3);
}
}
So, I am wondering is there a better approach to let C# fully load all of its dependencies? I really don't mind if it takes several seconds to completely load; I just do not want to do any high bandwidth transmissions until C# is ready for full speed.
Additional relevant details
This is a console application, the network transmission is run from a separate thread, and the main thread just waits for a key press to terminate the network transmitter.
In the Program.Main method I have tried to get the most performance from my application by using the highest priorities reasonable:
public static void Main(string[] args)
{
Process.GetCurrentProcess().PriorityClass = ProcessPriorityClass.High;
...
Thread workerThread = new Thread(new ThreadStart(worker.Run));
workerThread.Priority = ThreadPriority.Highest;
workerThread.Start();
...
Console.WriteLine("Press any key to stop the stream...");
WaitForKeyPress();
worker.RequestStop = true;
workerThread.Join();
Also, the socket settings I am currently using are shown below:
udpSocket = new Socket(targetEndPoint.Address.AddressFamily,
SocketType.Dgram,
ProtocolType.Udp);
udpSocket.Ttl = ttl;
udpSocket.SendBufferSize = 1024 * 1024;
udpSocket.Blocking = true;
udpSocket.Connect(targetEndPoint);
The default SendBufferSize is 8192, so I went ahead and moved it up to a megabyte, but this setting did not seem to have any affect on the dropped packets at the beginning.
From the comments I learned that TCP is not an option for you (because of inherent delays in transmission), also you do not want to loose packets due to other side being not fully loaded.
So you actually need to implement some features present in TCP (retransmission) but in more robust and lightweight fashion. I also assume that you are in control of the receiving side.
I propose that you send some predetermined number of packets. And then wait for confirmation. For instance, every packet can have an id that constantly grows. Every N packets, receiving application sends the number of last received packet to the sender. After receiving this number sender will know if it is necessary to repeat last N packets.
This approach should not hurt your bandwidth very much and you will get some sort of information about received data (although not guaranteed).
Otherwise it is best to switch to TCP. By the way did you try using TCP? How much your bandwidth hurts because of it?
I'm trying to communicate to a device using RS-485 through the serial port. Everything works fine, until we're trying to boost the communication to test the speed limit of the card then weird problem seem to occur. We are basically sending a first command with an image as arguments, and then another command to display this image. After every command, the card answers saying that the command was well received. But we are reaching limits too soon and the card is supposed to handle much more.
So I'm wondering since the transmission and the reception are going through the same wire, if there is some sort of collision of data? And should I wait to receive all the data? Is the SerialDataReceivedEventHandler too slow of this situation and should I keep reading the bytes in a while true loop in seperate thread and signal other thread once a complete message is arrived?
Other information :
We already have a protocol for communication : startdelimiter, data,
CRC16, enddelimiter
Sending in 2 commands is the way we do it and cannot be changed.
BaudRate is defined at 115200
The engineer is still working on the program in the card so problem might also be on his end.
English is not my first language so feel free to ask if I was not clear... :)
I recognize SerialPort programming is not my strength, and I've been trying to find some sort of wrapper but I haven't found any that would fit my needs. If someone has one to propose to me that'd be great or maybe someone has an idea of what could be wrong.
Anyway here is a bit of coding :
Thread sending frames :
public void SendOne()
{
timerLast = Stopwatch.GetTimestamp();
while (!Paused && conn.ClientConnState == Connexion.ConnectionState.Connected)
{
timerNow = Stopwatch.GetTimestamp();
if ((timerNow - timerLast) / (double)Stopwatch.Frequency >= 1 / (double)fps)
{
averageFPS.Add((int)((double)Stopwatch.Frequency / (timerNow - timerLast)) + 1);
if (averageFPS.Count > 10) averageFPS.RemoveAt(0);
timerLast = Stopwatch.GetTimestamp();
if (atFrame >= toSend.Count - 1)
{
atFrame = 0;
if (!isLoop)
Paused = true;
}
SendColorImage();
}
}
public void SendColorImage()
{
conn.Write(VIP16.bytesToVIP16(0x70C1, VIP16.Request.SendImage, toSend[++atFrame]));
WaitForResponse();
conn.Write(VIP16.bytesToVIP16(0x70C1, VIP16.Request.DisplayImage, VIP16.DisplayOnArg));
WaitForResponse();
}
private void WaitForResponse()
{
Thread.Sleep(25);
}
So the WaitForResponse() is crucial because if I send another command before the card answered it would go nuts. Although I hate to use Thread.Sleep() because it is not very accurate plus it'd limit my speed to 20fps, and if I use something lower than 25ms, risks of crash is much more likely to occur. So I was about to change the Thread.Sleep to "Read bytes until whole message is received" and ignore the DataReceivedEvent... just wondering if I'm completely off track here?
Tx a lot!
UPDATE 1
First Thank you Brad and 500 - Internal Server Error! But I've decide to stick with the .NET Serial Port for now and improve the Thread.Sleep accuracy (with timebeginperiod). I've decided to wait for the full response to be received and I synchronized my threads like so using ManualResetEventSlim (for speed) :
public static ManualResetEventSlim _waitHandle = new ManualResetEventSlim(false);
Then I changed SendColorIMage to :
public void SendColorImage()
{
conn.Write(VIP16.bytesToVIP16(0x70C1, VIP16.Requetes.SendImage, toSend[++atFrame]));
WaitForResponse();
conn.Write(VIP16.bytesToVIP16(0x70C1, VIP16.Requetes.DisplayImage, VIP16.DisplayOnArg));
WaitForResponse2();
}
private void WaitForResponse()
{
Connexion._waitHandle.Wait(100);
Thread.Sleep(20);
}
private void WaitForResponse2()
{
Connexion._waitHandle.Wait(100);
//Thread.Sleep(5);
}
With SerialDataReceivedEventHandler calling :
public void Recevoir(object sender, SerialDataReceivedEventArgs e)
{
if (!msg.IsIncomplete)
msg = new Vip16Message();
lock (locker)
{
if (sp.BytesToRead > 0)
{
byte[] byteMsg = new byte[sp.BytesToRead];
sp.Read(byteMsg, 0, byteMsg.Length);
msg.Insert(byteMsg);
}
}
if (!msg.IsIncomplete)
{
_waitHandle.Set();
if (MessageRecu != null)
MessageRecu(msg.toByte());
}
}
So I found out that after the second command I didn't need to call Thread.Sleep at all... and after the first one I needed to sleep for at least 20ms for the card not to crash. So I guess it's the time the card needs to receive/process the whole image to it's pixel. AND collision of data shouldn't really occur since I wait until whole message has arrived which means the problem is not on my end! YES! :p
A couple of pointers:
After sending, you'll want to wait for the transfer buffer empty event before reading the response. It's EV_TXEMPTY in unmanaged, I don't recall how it's encapsulated on the managed side - our RS485 code predates the .NET comport component.
You can reprogram the timer chip with a timeBeginPeriod(1) call to get a 1 millisecond resolution on Thread.Sleep().
For what it's worth, we sleep only briefly (1 ms) after send and then enter a reading loop where we keep attempting to read (again, with a 1 ms delay between read attempts) from the port until a full response has been received (or until a timeout or the retry counter is exhausted).
Here's the import declaration for timeBeginPeriod - I don't believe it's directly available in .NET (yet?):
[DllImport("winmm.dll")]
internal static extern uint timeBeginPeriod(uint period);
I hope this helps.