Serial Port Timeout

[Matt Nunnally]

I have this code to read from a serial port. I set the timeout to 6.5 seconds. Quite often I have an issue where I don't get a response from the device because system resources are being hogged by something else. Alot of times it takes way longer than 6.5 seconds to throw the timeout exception.

            _serialPort.ReadTimeout = 6500
            Do
                i = _serialPort.ReadByte
                bytes.Add(CByte(i))
            Loop Until i = 3 AndAlso _serialPort.BytesToRead = 1

Is there a way to lock down the system resources to only be doing this loop?

[tlhintoq]

Read the serial port on its own thread for starters.

[Matt Nunnally]

Yeah. As soon I posted this, that came to mind. So I set that up and it worked