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Some years ago I used them to transfer real-time waveforms from a medical device via USB and BLE links since they provided more than enough precision for the clinical application. The 2x bandwidth increase without resorting to compression (and its computational overhead) allowed us to meet the project specifications just by changing the type of the data array and recompiling.

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Ranged float or would unorm/snorm work as well ?

Depends on what you want to do and how you interpret your data. IIRC we only needed to normalize one parameter in the host using percentages instead in the UI. For the rest everything translated without modification since the F16 covered the max/min parameter ranges.

Mind this was for a regulated medical device and therefore any change in the software was burdensome. The change didn't affect the internal calculations since it was only for the communication protocol and UI, and the compiler support allowed the minimal changes on both embedded and host source codes.

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