Color Sensor Sampling Rate of only 2 Hz

[ArnavDagar]

``Hi,

The color sensor sampling rate is only 2 Hz, though the actual rate on the Spike Prime Website is 100 Hz (https://education.lego.com/v3/assets/blt293eea581807678a/blt62a78c227edef070/5f8801b9a302dc0d859a732b/techspecs_techniccolorsensor.pdf).

`from buildhat import Motor, ColorSensor import time

color_sensor = ColorSensor('B')

for i in range(10): print(time.time(), color_sensor.get_color()) `

Output: 1675486816.6453307 black 1675486817.074805 black 1675486817.4981308 black 1675486817.935994 black 1675486818.3843992 black 1675486818.821309 black 1675486819.2702649 black 1675486819.7176251 black 1675486820.1744425 black 1675486820.6134553 black.

Thanks in advance. Arnav

[mutesplash]

BuildHAT is slow. Issue #174 has another thread about update speeds for a different device.

[chrisruk]

One thing which may slightly help currently is to do -

color_sensor.avg_reads = 1

I'm going to try altering the library so that when you call color_sensor.get_color() it starts continuously obtaining values from the sensor at a user specified rate, which could be 100Hz etc, rather than just requesting a single update.

[chrisruk]

I've started working on a new pull request for this and have been able to get >= 100Hz, I need to do more testing with multiple devices though.

[ArnavDagar]

Thank you,

I want to experiment with this - how do I update my installed library to use the code? Do I need to reinstall the library?

[chrisruk]

If you want to try this, you'd have to checkout the sensorinterval branch (https://github.com/RaspberryPiFoundation/python-build-hat/tree/sensorinterval), you'd need to 'drop' the commit that says 'Drop this commit before release' though.

I'll hopefully try and get the changes from this branch, merged soon though into 'main'.

[chrisruk]

The latest changes are now in 'main' to try you can do the following -

pip uninstall buildhat
pip install git+https://github.com/RaspberryPiFoundation/python-build-hat.git

You might want to do the following to remove the 'averaging code'

color_sensor.avg_reads = 1

[ArnavDagar]

Hi @chrisruk,

Thank you so much for setting this up - I tested this out and it works great.

However, I am also using a RPLidar A1 with a UART USB Port. When I use the buildhat, it ends up choking the RPLidar.

I need to revert to the buildhat library that I was using from December, which was working earlier. How would I go about doing this?

Thanks, Arnav