I am making a program to talk to a piece of serial equipment. The code I have so far allows me to talk to the device just fine. However I would like to have the program do alert the user if the link does dead, along with triggering a different section of code. Ideally I would like the code to be able to detect a interruption in any part in the transmission.

I intend to have this code used with kivy with a user interface to indicate link status.

I have read about people using threading, and I have tried making timers with threading. But I think it all just gets messy.

Thank you for any input.

import serial
import time

# lineread is the variable to store the data read from comport
#    b"\x80"   is the format to read and write hex values   this = 80 in hex

SerialConfig = serial.Serial(port='COM5', baudrate=9600, parity=serial.PARITY_EVEN, timeout=.1) # comport configurations

def Start_loop():
    while True: # loop forever
        lineread = SerialConfig.read() # lineread variable is = to serial configurations reading from com port

        if lineread == b"\x80": # wait for device to start handshake
            SerialConfig.write(b"\x80") # reply to device with handshake
            del lineread # clear lineread variable to wait for next value to come in

            while True: # keep looping till
                lineread = SerialConfig.read()  # lineread variable is = to serial configurations reading from com port
                if lineread == b"\x80": # if comport sees reply respond with the following lines
                    SerialConfig.write(b"\xA0")
                    SerialConfig.write(b"\x90")
                    print("handshake complete")