Tips & tricks & pitfalls

Tips & tricks

Machines and factories within machines

Waiting while a led blinks

Atm_led led1;

led1.begin( 3 ).blink( 25, 500, 5 ).trigger( led1.EVT_BLINK );
while ( led1.cycle().state() );

Taking timers beyond the 49.7 day millis() rollover limit

You can easily combine a timer with a counter to achieve longer delays than the millis maximum of 49.7 days even within one state. A timer expiry switches the state back to itself while the counter is decremented in the ON_ENTER handler. That way the state refreshes its timer long before a second millis() rollover could occur.

To achieve a full year delay you could combine 86,400,000 (number of milliseconds in a day) as a timer value with 365 as a counter value and the machine would stay in that state for (about) a year.

Such a machine's begin function could look like this:

static const state_t state_table[] PROGMEM = {
/*             ON_ENTER    ON_LOOP  ON_EXIT EVT_START EVT_TIMER  EVT_COUNTER  ELSE */
/* IDLE   */   ACT_INIT, ATM_SLEEP,      -1,     WAIT,       -1,          -1,   -1, 
/* WAIT   */  ACT_COUNT,        -1,      -1,       -1,     WAIT,      FINISH,   -1, 
/* FINISH */ ACT_FINISH,        -1,      -1,       -1,       -1,          -1, IDLE, 
};
timer.begin( this, 86400000 );
counter.set( 365 );

Taking the counter value up to the maximum 65534 would give you about 179 years.

The Atm_timer machine has no problems with very long intervals:

Atm_timer t1, t2, t3;

void setup() {

  t1.begin()
   .interval( 10000 )
   .onTimer( [] ( int idx, int v, int up ) {
     Serial.println( "It is now 10 seonds later" );
   });

  t2.begin()
   .interval_seconds( 3155760000 )
   .onTimer( [] ( int idx, int v, int up ) {
     Serial.println( "It is now 100 years later" );
   });

  t3.begin()
   .interval_seconds( 3155760000 )
   .repeat( 65000 )
   .onFinish( [] ( int idx, int v, int up ) {
     Serial.println( "It is now 6.5 million years later" );
   });

}

Pitfalls

Race conditions