Serial protocol design in Raspberry Pi - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Serial Protocol Design on Raspberry Pi

📖 Scenario: You are working on a Raspberry Pi project that communicates with a sensor using a serial connection. The sensor sends data as a string of comma-separated values representing temperature, humidity, and pressure.Your task is to design a simple serial protocol in Python to read this data, parse it, and display the values clearly.

🎯 Goal: Build a Python program on Raspberry Pi that reads a serial data string from a sensor, parses the temperature, humidity, and pressure values, and prints them in a user-friendly format.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a variable to simulate the serial data string exactly as '25.3,40.2,1013.1'

Create a variable called delimiter set to ','

Use the split() method with delimiter to separate the data into a list

Print the temperature, humidity, and pressure values with labels

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Serial communication is common in electronics projects where Raspberry Pi talks to sensors or other devices. Parsing data correctly is essential to use sensor readings.

💼 Career

Understanding serial protocols and data parsing is important for embedded systems developers, IoT engineers, and anyone working with hardware interfaces.

1

DATA SETUP: Create the serial data string

Create a variable called serial_data and set it to the string '25.3,40.2,1013.1' to simulate the sensor data.

Raspberry Pi

# Create the serial_data string with exact value
# Your code here

Hint

Use quotes to create a string exactly as shown.

2

CONFIGURATION: Define the delimiter

Create a variable called delimiter and set it to the string ',' to separate the sensor values.

Raspberry Pi

serial_data = '25.3,40.2,1013.1'
# Create the delimiter variable with ','
# Your code here

Hint

The delimiter is a comma inside quotes.

3

CORE LOGIC: Parse the serial data string

Use the split() method on serial_data with delimiter to create a list called values containing the separate sensor readings.

Raspberry Pi

serial_data = '25.3,40.2,1013.1'
delimiter = ','
# Split serial_data by delimiter into values list
# Your code here

Hint

Use split() with the delimiter variable.

4

OUTPUT: Display the parsed sensor values

Print the temperature, humidity, and pressure values from the values list with labels exactly as:
Temperature: 25.3 C
Humidity: 40.2 %
Pressure: 1013.1 hPa

Raspberry Pi

serial_data = '25.3,40.2,1013.1'
delimiter = ','
values = serial_data.split(delimiter)
# Print the sensor values with labels
# Your code here

Hint

Use f-strings and index the values list to print each value with its unit.