Read data from serial port more quickly

[cortadocodes]

Summary

Read all data waiting on the serial port into an in-memory buffer each time the serial port is read from (instead of reading one or a few bytes at a time). When tests/test_packet_reader.py is run, this change provides a roughly 3x speed-up.

Contents (#22)

Enhancements

• Read all waiting bytes from serial port into memory

Operations

• Remove MacOS as a test runner

Testing

• Improve info packets test

[time-trader]

My serial port buffer still gets full when parsing data coming from Mics. I am not sure we get any improvement with this method.

[time-trader]

I also ran a very "scientific" test:
Commented out parsing and persistence on this branch: Buffer gets full
Commented out parsing and persistence on main branch: Buffer never gets full

startMics
[2021-12-23 02:11:02,497 | INFO | data_gateway.packet_reader] Microphones started 
[2021-12-23 02:11:02,498 | INFO | data_gateway.packet_reader] 
Exiting sleep

stopMics
[2021-12-23 02:25:44,797 | INFO | data_gateway.packet_reader] Microphone data reading done
[2021-12-23 02:25:45,472 | INFO | data_gateway.packet_reader] Microphone data erasing done
[2021-12-23 02:25:45,473 | INFO | data_gateway.packet_reader] 
Entering sleep

[cortadocodes]

My serial port buffer still gets full when parsing data coming from Mics. I am not sure we get any improvement with this method.

The improvement isn't sufficient to deal with microphones without also threading the gateway but it should be a more efficient way of reading. I think what I'll do is leave this branch and the previous threading branch open for now while I create a new branch off of main that only includes threading of the current (main branch) implementation of serial port reading. This will hopefully provide some clarity on the related issues here.

[cortadocodes]

This has been superseded by #30