Tag: interrupt

That’s One Small Step for a Man, One Giant Leap for a Debugger: On Single-Stepping and Interrupts

January 2, 2022 / nebel / 0 Comments

The featured image of this post is by WikiImages on Pixabay

You want to make a single step in your program, but the debugger takes you to some unknown area of the program. This was, in fact, my first experience when I tried out Microchip’s MPLAB X IDE debugger on the innocent blinking sketch. Is this a bug or a feature?

Communicating Asynchronously

October 26, 2021 / nebel / 1 Comment

The featured image of this post is by dooder – de.freepik.com

Serial asynchronous communication is one of the most common forms of communication between two electronic devices. Let us see, what Arduino libraries are there to support it, and let us check, how well they perform.

Is any Input Available?

October 21, 2021 / nebel / 3 Comments

The featured image of this post is by rawpixel.com – de.freepik.com

The SoftwareSerial class has the available() method, which returns the number of characters that have been already received but not yet read. This is very similar to what the standard Serial.available() method offers. There is an interesting difference, though. A call to SoftwareSerial.available() is significantly slower than a call to Serial.available(). We will look for the deeper reason for this strange behavior and I will show you three ways how to fix it.

EDIT: The problem will vanish with Arduino version 1.8.17

Timing the Timekeeper

October 20, 2021 / nebel / 1 Comment

The featured mage of this blog post is by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

What is the overhead imposed by the millis() interrupt? And can we get rid of it?