MATLAB: How to extract every other value from a 50000×1 array

MATLABserialvector processing

Hello.
I have a problem I can't solve. I read in values over a serial COM port, the valuea are 12bit ADC results but I need to send them as:
value = ADC_reading;
Serial.write(value >> 8);
Serial.write(value & 0xFF);
So when received in matlab its a stream of value pairs, for example:
2 251 2 251 2 251 2 251 2 251 2 251 2 251 2 251 2 251 2 251 2 251 2 251… though I store them as a n x 1 vector.
How can I process this vector?
I have been on the path of reading only one pair of values one byte at a time in some loop but that does not seem to be a good idea at all, I get problem when trying to solve the end value vector indexing.If there is no solution to this I 'could' send the values in its hole form but that will take at least 5 bytes per value and I am going out of my way to squeezing every little efficiency out of the setup in order to achieve as high a data throughput as possible.
Regards

Best Answer

If I'm understanding your question correctly,
x = [2 251 2 251 2 251 2 251 2 251 2 251 2 251 2 251 2 251 2 251 2 251 2 251];
a = x(1:2:end)
b = x(2:2:end)
a =
2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2
b =
251 251 251 251 251 251 251 251 251 251 251 251