Sending integer values to Arduino from PySerial

Question

I need to send integers greater than 255? Does anyone know how to do this?

Answer 1

Encode them into binary strings with Python's struct module. I don't know if arduino wants them little-endian or big-endian, but, if its docs aren't clear about this, a little experiment should easily settle the question;-).

Answer 2

Here's how (Thanks for the idea, Alex!):

Python:

def packIntegerAsULong(value):
    """Packs a python 4 byte unsigned integer to an arduino unsigned long"""
    return struct.pack('I', value)    #should check bounds

# To see what it looks like on python side
val = 15000
print binascii.hexlify(port.packIntegerAsULong(val))

# send and receive via pyserial
ser = serial.Serial(serialport, bps, timeout=1)
ser.write(packIntegerAsULong(val))
line = ser.readLine()
print line

Arduino:

unsigned long readULongFromBytes() {
  union u_tag {
    byte b[4];
    unsigned long ulval;
  } u;
  u.b[0] = Serial.read();
  u.b[1] = Serial.read();
  u.b[2] = Serial.read();
  u.b[3] = Serial.read();
  return u.ulval;
}
unsigned long val = readULongFromBytes();
Serial.print(val, DEC); // send to python to check