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up vote 3 down vote favorite

I like having serial communication for debugging and testing purposes but after a while it takes away too much speed from the sketch.

Is it possible to have the Arduino ignore serial.print and serial.println throughout my code, without turning it into a comment or placing every serial printing inside for example "if(debug == true)" statements?

Thanks in advance.

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2 Answers 2

up vote 6 down vote accepted

If you insist on top performance, the best thing would be to use a macro for that:

#define Sprintln(a) (Serial.println(a))

Then instead of 

Serial.println(F("Hello world!"));

write 

Sprintln(F("Hello world!"));

etc. To deactivate the Serial printing, define the macro empty:

#define Sprintln(a)

This will have the preprocessor remove all debugging code defined with Sprintln from your code.

(Of course, there's a huge number of variations on this theme.)

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You can also wrap all exiting prints in #ifdef ENABLE_PRINT and #endif and then define or comment out #define ENABLE_PRINT at the top of ur file –  portforwardpodcast 13 hours ago
up vote 2 down vote

You could, for example, use the preprocessor to change all Serial in your code.

#ifndef ENABLE_PRINT
// disable Serial output
#define Serial SomeOtherwiseUnusedName
static class {
public:
    void begin(...) {}
    void print(...) {}
    void println(...) {}
} Serial;
#endif
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Also need void begin(...) {} in the new class –  jwpat7 10 hours ago
    
@jwpat7 True, fixed that. –  Christopher Creutzig 6 hours ago

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