Producer consumers questions

Question

I am developing an application that reads and processes serial data from a prototype device.  The data is transferred from my device at 160 Hz and is comprised of about 200 bytes of data. Each data packet has header, data, and checksum bytes.  A illustration of my data packets would be the following: [Header bytes][Data bytes][Checksum bytes].
The main design pattern I am using in my application is the producer consumer design pattern.  The producer reads in the data byte-by-byte (via VISA Read) and enqueues it for the consumer loop.  The consumer loop dequeues the data byte-by-byte and then passes each byte through a state machine that finds the header, forms the data bytes into an array, and then finally parses, processes, and saves the data. The states of my state machine are:  find header, build packet array, and process and save.
I've used this approach in the past and it has always worked for me, but I've always wondered if it is the best solution for this type of application.  Are there better solutions out there?  Reading and processing data in byte-by-byte doesn't seem like a good idea, but it is simple and straightforward. 
I have been considering pushing all of the parsing, checking, processing, and saving into a third loop.  In this approach, my current consumer would act as both a consumer and a producer.  It would consume data by finding packet headers and building data packet arrays, and it would produce data by enqueuing data packet arrays for a new, second consumer loop.  The reasoning behind this approach is that it would separate tasks and allow me to only have to change the second consumer for different projects that use my base hardware.  Is this kind of approach reasonable or is it too complex and/or ill advised?

Answer 1

Will something like this work?
It looks like it should, but Match Regular Expression is throwing null character errors.
Attachments:
full.png ‏94 KB
state2.png ‏43 KB
state3.png ‏42 KB