I am collecting data from sensors with an ARM Cortex-M4 running and RTOS, 
and logging the data in binary format to an micro SD card, which is then 
periodically transferred to a PC for analysis.  I am using the FatFS [0] 
FAT32 filesystem library along with the ChibiOS RTOS [1].  After a few 
revisions of my data format, I realized that this problem is directly 
solved by Google Protocol Buffers and that I should be using something like 
it to manage the serialization/deserialization of my data.  However, it 
seems there are some challenges to get my firmware to build.  The two 
issues I'm facing are:

1) pthreads isn't available for my target.
2) Target device is an ARM Cortex-M4 with the armv7m-e instruction set.
3) ostream does not work out of the box in the embedded environment (though 
I might be able to serialize to a string)

Here are my questions:
1) Has anybody successfully used protocol buffers in an identical or very 
similar environment?  If so, can you point me to your code so I can see how 
you made it work, or offer any advice on what is needed?
2) I am tempted to use another project called nanopb [2] because it seems 
like it might be easier to get working on my embedded system.  Has anybody 
here used it who can report on how well it worked when inter-operating with 
GPB?  nanopb should be compatible with GPB but I just want to make sure the 
process is actually smooth sailing.  All my embedded code is in C++ so I 
would prefer to use GPB over nanopb if possible, but if it is too much to 
make GPB work on the embedded system then I guess I would have to use both 
(nanopb on firmware and GPB on PC that decodes data from the SD card).

Thank you for any insights or thoughts.

Dale

[0] -- http://elm-chan.org/fsw/ff/00index_e.html
[1] -- http://chibios.org/dokuwiki/doku.php
[2] -- http://koti.kapsi.fi/jpa/nanopb/

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