Binary protocol for DIY projects

Hello.
I am designing my own logger, and I want to use it together with the RC.
As a receiver, I use ublox M8 at 10Hz. There is a similar project on the forum, on Arduino.
I use Stm32F4.
I made the transmission of the signal from the can-bus via Bluetooth, using the RC3 protocol. Everything works, but it does not work very optimally.
It would be great if you could use a binary transfer protocol.
To transfer data from my device now, I need to send 3 text messages (2 GPS and 1 RC3).
At a frequency of at least 10 Hz, this is a fairly large amount of data.
In addition, to form these messages, most often use a function like a "sprintf". This is a standard feature and is very slow. I use a microcontroller with a frequency of 168 MHz, and the delay from the "sprintf" is noticeable. On the popular Arduino with a frequency of 16 MHz, this is even more noticeable.
Microcontrollers have very limited resources, so I would like to do without converting numbers into text. Moreover, the RC probably does the inverse conversion from text to numbers.

As a prototype of the protocol, I propose a binary protocol UBX from Ublox.
It is well documented and thought out, allows you to make packages not fixed length, but the minimum necessary. It could be used as a sample.

For example: at a frequency of 10 Hz, at a uart speed of 57600, only 19% of the possible load is used to transmit messages UBX-NAVPVT (contains all the necessary information about location and speed).

Comments

  • edited October 2018
    I've noticed the need for a binary protocol... To save bandwidth on RFCOMM, but also to be able to transmit over BLE, to gain iPhone support. I will need to build new testing equipment, to be able to test the new protocol. I've already ordered hardware for this, but it will need a lot of work - as I will need to build a fully functional device. But hopefully I have time for this during the winter...
  • Hi, aol.
    Any news about binary protocol?
  • edited March 2019
    Right now I'm finishing the next version features. The new DIY APIs will come soon after that. The next version contains lot of stuff needed for the DIY APIs, but the APIs themselves have to wait little bit longer, as I need to build the devices too for that.
  • My STM32/Arduino project use the same UBX binary protocol as sst78rus suggested, and I found it to be efficient and fairly easy to use.
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