For those unfamiliar with German, they read numbers aloud in a unique way. 65536 is "sixty five thousand five hundred six
and thirty" (Edit: this is inaccurate). I present German-endian as a common enemy!
-----
At least for me, reading 16- and/or 32-bit multi-channel sensor data and then transceiving via 8-bit radio (atmega32u4) is at least a little easier when all the endians align. No byte swapping. No jumping a pointer ahead for each byte in a packet. Most importantly, no calling swapbytes (and its relevant data casts) in Matlab reading the serial data directly off the microcontroller.
While this is all relatively straightforward to code, each extra line is another tiny chance of error, and the failure modes in streaming data are not always obvious e.g. FIFO size is a power of two but channel data is an odd number of bytes/words. Do you drop data or pause until FIFO empties? Do circular buffers increment or decrement?
Luckily, modern sensors (e.g. IMUs) I've used usually have registers to byte swap, drop LSBs when not needed, choose right or left zero bit padding, change channel order, alter FIFO behavior, interrupt at a FIFO threshold, and so on.
-----
At least for me, reading 16- and/or 32-bit multi-channel sensor data and then transceiving via 8-bit radio (atmega32u4) is at least a little easier when all the endians align. No byte swapping. No jumping a pointer ahead for each byte in a packet. Most importantly, no calling swapbytes (and its relevant data casts) in Matlab reading the serial data directly off the microcontroller.
While this is all relatively straightforward to code, each extra line is another tiny chance of error, and the failure modes in streaming data are not always obvious e.g. FIFO size is a power of two but channel data is an odd number of bytes/words. Do you drop data or pause until FIFO empties? Do circular buffers increment or decrement?
Luckily, modern sensors (e.g. IMUs) I've used usually have registers to byte swap, drop LSBs when not needed, choose right or left zero bit padding, change channel order, alter FIFO behavior, interrupt at a FIFO threshold, and so on.