I’ve been working on improving the UDP-E or UDP-with-echo protocol I describe here to make it more flexible and to improve reliability. I’m currently testing it with a Raspberry Pi as the controller, and an Arduino UNO plus Ethernet shield as the peripheral. The goal is to create a protocol which will allow the controller to send messages to the peripheral, and the peripheral will echo messages back to the controller if the received messages are verified as valid. The controller will retry sending each message if (a) the echoed message is not received by the controller before a timeout occurs, or (b) the echoed message is received but fails validation tests. This protocol should make communications with the UDP protocol more reliable than one would get with data only with UDP. At the same time, this protocol will accomplish this with much less overhead than using TCP, and with performance much closer to real time. Hopefully I’ll have more to report within the next few weeks.