I have a setup involving a few Arduino mega boards. I can communicate with all of them using a usb hub (successfully), but I was worried about the load on my laptop.
Does anyone have any idea about about how resource intensive serial communication is on a laptop (dual core windows 7) at about 100kbps?
I was thinking that instead of having multiple serial connections to each of the Arduino mega boards, I would have less connections (but the same amount of data), and use I2C between the Arduinos.
Does anyone have any idea about about how resource intensive serial communication is on a laptop
The hardware side on the laptop is all USB, so it is not very resource-intensive at all. (however, the application can be more or less efficient in getting the data from USB through the virtual serial port to the app. Reading one byte at a time on multiple ports running at 100kbps is probably not a great idea, and being more efficient may not be intuitively "easy.")
In the end, you should benchmark your particular application (or a model of it.)