Using the elastic equalizing scheme I described in the previous post requires you to be aware of two issues.

1) The 1 millisecond like shown in the example is a use of processor bandwidth that becomes non available to other software functions. It is not a high overhead but it is there. 1 msec out of 50 represents a 2% budget of the processor bandwidth.

2) In some situations this scheme may be tried but the amount of time needed to be allocated could be more like say 3 or 5 milliseconds. With situations like this, if you are using a peripheral like the UART you need to be aware that it could miss a character at high baud rates during the elastic equalize period. Even at 9600 baud a 10 bit async serial character frame is just over 1 millisecond. So data could be lost. This is not quite so big a problem....If you have a worst case latency that requires an elastic time of 3 milliseconds, you were going to lose characters already, just with introducing the elastic mechanism you will lose then a lot more often. It is possible to compensate for this be lowering the baud rate or devising a scheme to throttle the character flow from the other end of the serial cable by either demanding a spacing time between characters or introducung a hardware handshaking system via the likes of a CTS / RTS link.

Michael Karas