Hi all,
I'm trying to use the Arduino UNO to act as an interface between a PC and a particle beam telescope (odd application, I know. Not the best option either, but we were looking for cheap.) What I need is the Arduino to send a short reset pulse to a gate generator when our data-acquisition software sends an "all-ok" flag to the Arduino.
I've found that I'm able to produce a 4us pulse from the Arduino on command (a bit long, but I'll take it). The problem is that serial communications between the PC and the Arduino are taking too long - without threading our test application we have a reset pulse frequency of about 1 kHz. When taking data using cosmic rays this isn't a problem, but we need to make the system as fast as possible for use in an accelerator beam test. There, the data rates will be much higher with limited access.
Ideally we'd like to hit a 1 MHz rate if possible, but 100 kHz would also be acceptable. Obviously we're limited by serial communication (113 kbaud, and low priority in windows) at this point, but is there anything we can do to squeeze some more juice out of the Arduino? Maybe bypass serial communication and go directly to USB?
I must note that we are constrained to using Windows XP as our OS (DAQ requirement), so no RTOS solutions are possible. Apologies if this topic was already covered, I've been googling for days, and haven't found any with a solution.