TF mini sensor slow uart readings

[Gordon tessier]

HI all,

i am playing with a TF mini distance sensor thru uart.
just grabbed the example code from git for pyboard and just changed to pycom uart.
i have to play with the time.sleep or it just wont read the packets properly.
i played with different time.sleeps and found 20ms seems to work the best but the readings have a delay.
some times 1 or 2 seconds in between sometime 5-10 secs.

when i trying with the Benewake windows app plugged into the sensor the readings are fast and update pretty much instantly. I also trying with python on windows and and it also seems to be fairly good.
when i print the uart.recv this is an example data coming in b'\xe8\t\xffYY\xa7\x00\x828'

when the reads are good this the data b'YY\xa7\x00\x878\xe8\t\t'
which prints distance in cm and signal strength 167 14471

any ideas on how to get more accurate readings in pycom in decent update speeds?

import time, utime
from network import WLAN
import os
import time
import sys, machine, gc, utime, struct
from machine import Pin, I2C
import json
#from microWebSrv import MicroWebSrv
import pycom
#import rf
uart = UART(1, 115200, pins=('P10','P20'),timeout_chars=1)

while True:
    try:
        time.sleep_ms(25)
        recv = uart.read(9)
        print(recv)
        
        if len(recv) == 9:
            if recv[0] == 0x59 and recv[1] == 0x59: 
                checksum = 0
                for i in range(0, 8):
                    checksum = checksum + recv[i]
                    #print (checksum)
                    
                checksum = checksum % 256
                if checksum == recv[8]:
                    distance = recv[2] + recv[3] * 256
                    
                    strength = recv[4] + recv[5] * 256
                    print(distance,strength)   
    except Exception as e:
        print(e)```