Polling for information

[piccc]

I have a camera and it is connected to a pic via serial TTL running at 11200 baud (or something like). The action of the pic depends on the data comming from the camera. If I poll the camera for information, would that slow down my pic running at 40mhz because the serial TTL is running at 1120?

[PCM programmer]

It's best if you use an interrupt-driven receive buffer, such as the one
shown in the CCS example file, EX_SISR.C. If you set the buffer size
at some reasonably large number of characters, then it gives you time
to go do something else in your program while the INT_RDA isr takes
care of handling incoming characters. Just periodically test "bkbhit"
to see if you have any chars in the buffer. If so, then call bgetc() to
pull them out of the buffer. You do have to check bkbhit often enough
so that you don't get buffer overflow and lose chars.