I needed to stuff twice the telemetry through the same 115 kbaud line on a Cortex-M0+ that only had 8 kB flash left.
Micro-RLE is the smallest drop-in I could come up with: 264 B of Thumb code, 36 B of state, no malloc, worst-case 14 cycles/byte and still lossless for every 8-bit pattern.
On the usual sensor streams (ADC, IMU, GPS) it’s 33-70 % smaller than raw output and boots in < 600 µs, so you can fire-and-forget from main() before the PLL even locks.
Repo is a single .c file and a 3-function API—replace the weak emit() hook with your UART / DMA / ring-buffer and you’re done.
Size proof: arm-none-eabi-size micro_rle.o
text data bss
264 0 36
MIT licensed, link in the repo. Happy to hear where else this fits!
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45784368
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Source: github.com
